Magnetic characterization of Mumetal® for passive shielding of stray fields down to the nano-Tesla level

The luminosity of a particle collider is an extremely crucial performance parameter describing its capability of producing interactions in the collision point. However, imperfections in a collider can lead to luminosity loss. Among different imperfections, an important one is stray magnetic fields. For the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), a collider being considered as one of the main options in Europe after the Large Hadron Collider, simulations showed an unprecedented sensitivity of the machine to fields on the order of 0.1 nT. Hence, such tight constraints require special design considerations to prevent performance loss. Different shielding techniques are available in the literature, typically relying on an active shielding strategy and capable of reducing the magnetic field amplitudes down to the nano-Tesla level. However, measuring fields with such amplitudes is challenging by using state-of-the-art commercially available sensors and therefore, a passive shielding strategy, consisting in enveloping sections of the beamline with a magnetic shield, is a more attractive option. For CLIC, Mumetal®, a Ni–Fe alloy with advertised relative permeability above 100,000, was chosen. In this paper, the DC and AC magnetic characterization of two samples of Mumetal®, one annealed in its final form and the other one non-annealed is presented, showcasing how the annealing results in a boost of the magnetic permeability of more than order of magnitude. As a case study, the shielding performance of a 1-mm thin layer of Mumetal® enveloping CLIC’s beamline is estimated.