Status of the FETS Project

The Front End Test Stand (FETS) under construction at RAL is a demonstrator for front end systems of a future high power proton linac. Possible applications include a linac upgrade for the ISIS spallation neutron source, new future neutron sources, accelerator driven sub-critical systems, high energy physics proton drivers etc. Designed to deliver a 60mA H-minus beam at 3MeV with a 10% duty factor, FETS consists of a high brightness ion source, magnetic low energy beam transport (LEBT), 4-vane 324MHz radio frequency quadrupole, medium energy beam transport (MEBT) containing a high speed beam chopper and non-destructive laser diagnostics. This paper describes the current status of the project and future plans

Optimisation of the COMET experiment to search for charged lepton flavour violation and a new simulation to study the performance of the EMMA FFAG accelerator

The particle tracking software package, GPT, has been developed and utilised to simulate the beam optics of the EMMA injection line and ring, constructed at the Daresbury Laboratory, UK. EMMA is a proof-of-principle machine for a new type of accelerator: a non-scaling fixed-field alternating gradient (ns-FFAG) accelerator. As such the beam dynamics of the magnetic lattice require benchmarking, with GPT chosen for its space-charge self-field simulation package. Tune and time-of-flight measurements have been successfully simulated and compared to experimental data, recorded during the first few runs of the machine. Measurements confirm the successful operation of EMMA as a ns-FFAG accelerator and simulations highlight that space-charge effects are observable in the EMMA bunch-charge and energy regime. Such accelerators have many applications within and outside particle physics, ranging from cancer therapy and accelerator driven thorium reactors to neutrino factories and muon colliders. The application of FFAGs and the design of the COMET/PRISM experiment, which is seeking to measure muon-to-electron conversion at the 10^−18 level, is investigated. Simulations of the COMET experiment, staged in two phases, have been performed with a focus on optimisation of the stopping target design. A number of geometries have been tested, with a cone then disk structure preferred for Phase-I then Phase-II respectively. Initial data from the COMET precursor experiment, MuSIC, have also been analysed and successfully compared to simulation