Studies of the high-performance muon capture front-end lattice for the IDS Neutrino Factory

It is believed that a neutrino factory would deliver unparalleled performance in studying neutrino mixing and would provide tremendous sensitivity to new physics in the neutrino sector. A neutrino factory employs muons which are produced, collected, accelerated and then stored so that their eventual decay produces an intense neutrino beam. A key challenge is that the initial muon beam occupies a region in phase space that vastly exceeds the acceptance of the downstream accelerators. Here we study a novel method to manipulate the longitudinal and transverse phase space with the purpose of collecting and cooling a muon beam. In this method, a set of properly tuned rf cavities captures the muon beams into strings of bunches and aligns them to nearly equal central energies, and a following set of rf cavities with absorbers cools them by a factor of three in transverse emittance. The sensitivity in performance of the channel against key parameters such as the number of cavities, accelerating gradient and magnetic field is analyzed. Finally, the lattice tolerance to positioning errors of various lattice components is systematically examined.