Fast Time-of-Flight System for Muon Cooling Experiments

The development of high-energy muon collider accelerators depends on being able to reduce the muon beam emittance in all 6-dimensions. Precision timing measurements are needed to compute the 6-dimensional emittance of beams passing through muon cooling channels. Recent advances in fast timing technology need to be applied to muon cooling experiments to evaluate the performance of proposed muon cooling channel designs. New fined-grained fast timing detectors are being developed that can improve timing resolutions from the current ~ 50 picoseconds to ~10 picoseconds or less and spatial resolutions from the current ~1cm to ~1mm or less. We plan to evaluate the improvements expected for emittance measurements and to design a prototype system of detectors and the related calibration, clock,and readout systems for use in muon cooling channel experiments with beam intensities 102 -106 muons/second. Phase I consists of studies of emittance measurement resolutions achievable with advanced timing detectors installed in the current MICE experiment and in the proposed MANX experiment, and possibly for other candidate cooling channel designs, including optimization of number of detector planes, positions and sizes of detectors, effects of detector thickness and materials, and requirements for clock and readout systems. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: Direct benefits apply to improvements of measurements of muon cooling channel performance in current and future experiments, including substantial reductions in system cost. The Phase II system provides a first system test for new and improved fast timing detectors in a real application. Fast timing detectors with fine spatial resolution, large sizes, and low costs have many applications in physics research, PET scanners and other industrial application.