Beam Dynamics in an Ionisation Cooling Channel

The Neutrino Factory has been proposed as a facility to provide an intense source of neutrinos suitable for the measurement of neutrino oscillation parameters and a possible CP violating phase to unprecedented precision. In the Neutrino Factory, neutrinos are produced by the decay of a muon beam with 20-50 GeV per muon. Initially, the muon beam occupies a large volume in phase space, which must be reduced before the beam can be accelerated. The proposed method to achieve this is to use a solenoidal ionisation cooling channel. In this thesis the physics of the cooling channel is described including the cooling effects of different materials and the beam optics of solenoidal focussing and radio frequency cavities. The Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment is described, in which a section of a long cooling channel will be constructed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, the cooling performance measured and compared with computer simulation. The simulation of the cooling channel in the G4MICE code is detailed and the accuracy of such simulations is investigated. The beam dynamics of the simulated cooling channel is examined and the cooling performance of the channel is studied. The cooling measurement is simulated and the simulated measurement is compared with the simulated true cooling performance.