Stopping muon beams
The study of rare processes using stopping muon beams provides access to new physics that cannot be addressed at energy frontier machines. The flux of muons into a small stopping target is limited by the production process and by stochastic processes in the material used to slow the particles. Innovative muon beam cooling techniques are being applied to the design of stopping muon beams in order to increase the event rates in such experiments. Intense stopping muon beams will also aid the development of applications such as muon spin resonance and muon-catalyzed fusion.
Using the Fermilab proton source for a muon to electron conversion experiment
The Fermilab proton source is capable of providing 8 GeV protons for both the future long-baseline neutrino program (NuMI), and for a new program of low energy muon experiments. In particular, if the 8 GeV protons are rebunched and then slowly extracted into an external beamline, the resulting proton beam would be suitable for a muon-to-electron conversion experiment designed to improve on the existing sensitivity by three orders of magnitude. We describe a scheme for the required beam manipulations. The scheme uses the Accumulator for momentum stacking, and the Debuncher for bunching and slow extraction. This would permit simultaneous operation of the muon program with the future NuMI program, delivering 10{sup 20} protons per year at 8 GeV for the muon program at the cost of a modest ({approx}10%) reduction in the protons available to the neutrino program.
Creating the Virtual Universe
Simulation software is important to our understanding of the universe. The intrinsic multiphysics aspects are spiced with a range of temporal scales and spatial scales, both of which cover more digits than are available in the standard hardware. This, together with the intrinsic chaotic nature of many physical processes, poses quite a challenge. To meet this challenge, researchers developed the Astronomical Multipurpose Environment (AMUSE). Instead of writing a suite of multiphysics solvers from scratch, AMUSE's developers coupled existing solvers for each physical ingredient. The result is a highly inhomogeneous collection of dedicated solvers with a homogeneous protocol that scales to supercomputers.