The MICE experiment

One of the most important requirements for a neutrino factory and a muon collider is the ability to cool the muons to increase the phase space density. As all existing cooling techniques do not work for muons, a new method has been proposed: ionization cooling. As this is a completely unproven technique, a series of experiments is being built to investigate the cooling process in some detail. MICE is the last and biggest of these and is being designed to show that ionization cooling works and to learn more about the cooling process itself. This paper describes MICE in some detail and outlines its expected performance in measuring cooling.