Description
This report presents new physics opportunities at CERN made possible by muon and neutrino beams of unprecedented intensity, achieved through a staged approach in the realization of the Muon Collider as proposed by the International Muon Collider Collaboration (IMCC).
Unlike other facilities, in a multi-TeV Muon Collider every advancement in energy and intensity opens new windows of opportunity for physics, creating a dual benefit: enabling excellent scientific output while simultaneously developing cutting-edge technologies for the host laboratory.
From this perspective, the recent project aimed at establishing a muon cooling channel facility at CERN, based on ionization cooling, can be envisaged as the first step in this direction. This technology offers numerous advantages among which, first and foremost, the production of high-intensity, collimated muon beams of both polarities.
This approach opens up the possibility, for the first time, of producing both muon (anti)neutrinos and electron (anti)neutrinos by exploiting the decay of $\mu^-$ ($\mu^+$), which is much cleaner in composition compared to the conventional method based on meson decay. The exploitation of the infrastructure for neutrino physics can start as soon as the first high-precision tertiary muon beams are available. At the same time, several opportunities are offered by directly exploiting the muon beams, from the low energies straight from the cooling channel (for Charged Lepton Flavor Violating processes), to additional physics with gradually increasing beam energies (g-2, EDM, dark matter searches), in experimental conditions not available elsewhere.
In this report, we emphasize the physics opportunities that accompany the staged implementation of the Muon Collider high intensity muon source. We focus both on the physics opportunities at relatively low energies (from tens of MeV to tens of GeV) enabled by the first stage of the Muon Collider and on the unique perspective of equipping CERN with high-brightness, high-intensity muon beams at even higher energies.
