Multiple Coulomb scattering of muons in lithium hydride

(MICE Collaboration)

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multiple Coulomb scattering (MCS) is a well-known phenomenon occurring when charged particles traverse materials. Measurements of muons traversing low Z materials made in the MuScat experiment showed that theoretical models and simulation codes, such as geant4 (v7.0), over-estimated the scattering. The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) measured the cooling of a muon beam traversing a liquid hydrogen or lithium hydride (LiH) energy absorber as part of a programme to develop muon accelerator facilities, such as a neutrino factory or a muon collider. The energy loss and MCS that occur in the absorber material are competing effects that alter the performance of the cooling channel. Therefore measurements of MCS are required in order to validate the simulations used to predict the cooling performance in future accelerator facilities. We report measurements made in the MICE apparatus of MCS using a LiH absorber and muons within the momentum range 160 to 245 MeV/c. The measured RMS scattering width is about 9% smaller than that predicted by the approximate formula proposed by the Particle Data Group, but within the latter's stated uncertainty. Data at 172, 200 and 240 MeV/c are compared to the geant4 (v9.6) default scattering model. These measurements show agreement with this more recent geant4 (v9.6) version over the range of incident muon momenta.

Original languageEnglish
Article number092003
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume106
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 1 2022
Externally publishedYes

Funding

The work described here was made possible by grants from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK), the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (USA), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy), the European Union under the European Union’s Framework Programme 7 (AIDA project, Grant Agreement No. 262025; TIARA project, Grant Agreement No. 261905; and EuCARD), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Research Foundation of Korea (No. NRF-2016R1A5A1013277), the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, the Institute of High Energy Physics/Chinese Academy of Sciences fund for collaboration between the People’s Republic of China and the USA, and the Swiss National Science Foundation in the framework of the SCOPES program. We gratefully acknowledge all sources of support. We are grateful for the support given to us by the staff of the STFC Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury laboratories. We acknowledge the use of Grid computing resources deployed and operated by GridPP in the UK .

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