An ionization cooling channel for muon beams based on alternating solenoids

The muon collider requires intense, cooled muon bunches to reach the required luminosity. Due to the limited lifetime of the muon, the cooling process must take place very rapidly. Ionization cooling seems to be our only option, given the large emittances of the muon beam from pion decay. However, this ionization cooling method has been found quite difficult to implement in practice. We describe a scheme based on the use of liquid hydrogen absorbers followed by RF cavities ("pillbox" or "open iris" type), embedded in a transport lattice based on high field solenoids. These solenoidal fields are reversed periodically in order to suppress the growth of the canonical angular momentum. This channel has been simulated in detail with independent codes, featuring conventional tracking in e.m. fields and detailed simulation of multiple scattering and straggling in the the absorbers and windows. These calculations show that the 15 Tesla lattice cools in 6D phase space by a factor /spl ap/2 over a distance of 20 m.