Design and simulation of the nuSTORM facility

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2015-04
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[Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University
Abstract
This thesis provides a full design and simulation of the nuSTORM beam line facility including the pion beam line , the pion and muon orbit combination section, and the muon decay ring. The study also includes the development of numerical optimization methods and their application to the design. At nuSTORM, one proton batch from the Main Injector (MI) is extracted and transported to the target station to bombard a solid target. A magnetic horn is used as the collection device for the secondary particles such as pions and kaons. A pion beam line is designed to transport the secondary particles downstream to the muon decay ring. In order to avoid the use of a fast kicker with a large aperture for the injection, an Orbit Combination Section (OCS) was designed to combine the reference pion orbit with the circulating muon orbit. This fulfills the stochastic injection scheme proposed in the 1980s. It is shown through the simulation that the pion beam line is able to deliver 0.011 muons per proton on target within the acceptance of the ring. In order to improve the circulating muon flux, an optimization of the magnetic collection horn was studied. A Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA), that was modified to integrate Message Passing Interface (MPI) in the process, is applied to the optimization. The number of muons within the ring acceptance from the pion decay is estimated by the pions after the collection horn. This new method was proposed to lower the requirement on the computing resources for the optimization. The study gives a new and better target and horn configuration after a full investigation of the system. The nuSTORM ring is examined with two optics designs. With different features, the two designs are optimized via correcting the nonlinearities with sextupolar field distribution in the ring. A modified MPI-based Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm was applied to obtain the optimal ring acceptance. The comparison with the GA shows good agreements on the achieved optimal ring acceptance. The pion and muon beams at nuSTORM were simulated and yield flavor-pure and precisely measurable neutrino beams, which can be used to provide a definite statement about the existence of a sterile neutrino.
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Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Physics, 2015
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accelerator design, beam dynamics, muon facility, neutrino factory, nuSTORM, optimization algorithms
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Doctoral Dissertation