Status of MICE

Over 25 years have passed since the proposal of ionization cooling [1]. This key enabling technology for intense stored muon beams will be demonstrated experimentally for the first time in the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE). Potential applications include: (1) neutrino factories, a powerful tool for the study of neutrino oscillation and leptonic CP violation [2]; and (2) muon colliders, capable of high-luminosity, multi-TeV, lepton-antilepton collisions as well as precision studies of s-channel-produced Higgs bosons [3]. MICE is an experimental program to establish the feasibility and performance of ionization cooling. The approach is to measure precisely the emittance of a 140 to 240 MeV/c muon beam both before and after an ionization-cooling cell. The MICE collaboration includes over 100 accelerator and particle physicists and engineers from Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. The experiment is currently under construction at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK.