(1) University of Glasgow, Kelvin Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland.
The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will measure ionization cooling from a beam of muons at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. The aim of MICE is to measure a fractional drop in emittance, due to ionization cooling, of order 10% for a range of emittances and momenta, to an accuracy of 1%. A greater understanding of the statistical (as well as systematic) errors on emittance measurement in MICE is paramount to meeting this goal. This paper describes a study aimed at exploiting the computing power of the Grid to determine the number of muons necessary to meet the scientific goals of MICE. In this study, tens of thousands of G4MICE Monte Carlo simulations were run to determine the scaling laws that govern the fractional change in emittance as a function of the number of muons (N) in the simulation. By varying random conditions, the standard deviation of these distributions was studied as a function of N. The results of the study indicate that, due to the effect of correlations, of order 105 muons are required to meet the goal of MICE for large emittance beams, without which 106 would be required.
NuFact09, 11th International Workshop on
Neutrino Factories, Superbeams and Beta Beams
20-25 July 2009, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago