Seminar: Kenneth Long

Wednesday 17 December, 2014 at 1:00 PM

IPB Library "Dragan Popović"

MICE as a step towards the Neutrino Factory

Kenneth Long, Imperial College London and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)

Muon beams of low emittance provide the basis for the intense, well-characterised neutrino beams necessary to elucidate the physics of flavour at the Neutrino Factory and to provide lepton-anti-lepton collisions at energies of up to several TeV at the Muon Collider. The International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will demonstrate ionization cooling; the technique by which it is proposed to reduce the phase-space volume occupied by the muon beam at such facilities.

The status of the MICE construction project will be described together with a summary of the performance of the principal components. Plans for the commissioning and operation of the experiment will be outlined and the measurement programme that will begin next spring will be described. The crucial role of MICE in the development of the long- and short-baseline neutrino programmes will be outlined and the opportunity to develop neutrino beams based on stored muons as a new technique for particle physics will be described.

Bio:

Ken Long is Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Imperial College London. Having studied the hadronic final states produced in deep inelastic muon-proton scattering as a graduate student at Oxford, he went to CERN in 1985 to work on the UA1 experiment.

Returning to the UK in 1987, he joined the ZEUS experiment at DESY in Hamburg, contributing to the design and construction of the experiment, the development of the reconstruction and simulation software, the measurement of the structure of both the proton and the photon and making detailed studies of the electroweak interaction.

Fascinated by the mysteries hinted at by the discovery of neutrino oscillations at the turn of the century, he played a leading role in the development of the techniques required to produce intense beams of high-energy neutrinos on an industrial scale at the Neutrino Factory.

In this context he chairs the International Design Study for the Neutrino Factory (the IDS-NF), is the UK PI for the international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment that is under construction at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and is co-chair of the national and Anglo-American Proton Accelerators for Science and Innovation (PASI) collaborations.