Superconducting Muon Collider Concepts PDF Download

High energy colliding beam machines for elementary particle research have grown so costly that funding for them has become problematical. The physics they would explore, however, remains compelling, so that new methods must be found to reach high energy if this physics is to be studied. One such new approach is the muon collider. This machine could reach multi-TeV collision energies with good luminosity at an affordable cost. The scenario for producing[mu][sup+][mu][sup[minus]] collisions is shown schematically in a figure. A high intensity proton synchrotron delivers protons in sharply defined bunches onto a stationary target with an energy of 30 GeV. Many pions are produced that decay into muons; both are collected in a solenoid magnet system with useful energies in the range 0.1--1.0 GeV. The muons are then cooled, i.e. their transverse momentum as well as the spread in their longitudinal momentum is reduced. In this way, a bunch of protons is turned into a bunch of positive or negative muons suitable for acceleration and collision. The energy of the muons at this stage is only 0.02 GeV. Acceleration is accomplished in a series of recirculating linac accelerators, similar to the approach used in CEBAF. Upon reaching 2,000 GeV (2 TeV) of energy, the muons are transferred into a ring where positive and negative muons, transferred in successive bunches, collide and the collisions studied in a suitable detector. About 25% of the muons originally collected survive into the collider ring, and here they live for an average of[approximately] 1,000 revolutions. At this point, the surviving muons are dumped and new bunches are injected. This paper describes in abbreviated form the main features and parameters of the presently envisioned muon collider, most of it taken from the latter two reports.