Illinois Institute of Technology is cohosting the 36th Collaboration Meeting of the International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) with Fermilab, Monday, June 17 through Wednesday, June 19. Dan Kaplan, professor of physics and director of IIT Center for Accelerator and Particle Physics; Pavel Snopok, assistant professor of physics; and Yagmur Torun, associate professor of physics, are organizing the meeting.

The first two days of the event will be held on IIT Main Campus, followed by a third day at Fermilab. Preceding the collaboration meeting, IIT will be hosting a MICE Software Workshop on Saturday, June 15 and Sunday, June 16.

The goal of MICE is to establish a new particle beam technology—a “cooled” muon beam—by demonstrating the most promising proposed method of muon cooling, ionization cooling. This involves focusing the beam as it loses energy by passing through hydrogen or other light elements (helium, lithium, etc.), ionizing nearby atoms. The performance of a new and promising line of muon accelerators relies heavily on the concept of ionization cooling of muons, for which MICE is the proof of principle.

MICE was initially conceived around 2000 and was approved at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom in 2003. It is funded by the United States Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, the European Community under the European Commission Framework Programme 7, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

IIT is one of the founding institutions of MICE and is the largest U.S. university group in the collaboration.

To learn more about the collaboration meeting click here.