Construction and testing of the scintillating fibre trackers for MICE

The discovery of neutrino mass through experimental evidence of neutrino oscillations at the end of the last century has provided the first proof that the Standard Model of particle physics is incomplete. To be able to extend the Standard Model to incorporate massive neutrinos first requires many theoretical uncertainties surrounding the particle and its interactions to be understood. Therefore, a dedicated experimental programme is needed over the coming decades to provide precision measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters and also a possible measurement of CP violation in the lepton sector, which could have astrophysical consequences. An intense source of neutrinos is required to achieve these precision measurements and the leading contender proposed to provide this neutrino beam, is the Neutrino Factory. Before a Neutrino Factory facility can be realised, a number of technological challenges need to be evaluated and understood first. One of which, is reduce the large phase space volume (emittance) of the initial muon beam, which is eventually stored and through decay provides the neutrino beam. Ionisation cooling is the chosen method to achieve this and the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) at Rutherford Laboratory in the UK, is required to demonstrate ionisation cooling and its feasibility formore » a Neutrino Factory. To demonstrate ionisation cooling, a section of a cooling channel will be constructed and single-particle measurements of emittance of a muon beam before and after the cooling channel from particle spectrometers will be compared. To measure emittance accurately requires precision measurements of the momenta and spatial coordinates at the spectrometers by tracking devices in a uniform magnetic field. The focus of this thesis is based around the construction and testing of the MICE tracker(s), including a study of its simulated performance and also construction and testing of a prototype.« less