A Study of Muon Ionization Cooling at MICE

A Neutrino Factory based on a high-energy muon storage-ring is proposed to study neutrino oscillation with high precision. An emittance reduction of muon beam by ionization cooling, which has never been demonstrated in practice, is one of the critical issues for Neutrino Factory. The international Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) is the first experiment to verify an effect of the ionization cooling with muons. MICE will measure a change in transverse emittance of approximately 10% with a precision of ±0.1%. In order to meet the requirements, muon trackers based on 350 (micro)m diameter scintillating fibers have been proposed. The construction of such trackers is a very challenging task and some innovative techniques are needed to realize, since there have been no trackers made with such a small diameter of scintillating fibers in the world. Upstream and downstream SciFi trackers have been successfully constructed with the international collaboration of UK, US and Japan by 2008. Both of the trackers have been tested with cosmic-rays at the RAL by 2009, at which high tracking efficiencies more than 90% are measured for both trackers. It is also confirmed that by collecting the misalignments found in both of the trackers, the requirements for the emittance measurement is met.