Muons at ISIS

For the last 30 years, muon experiments at ISIS pulsed neutron and muon facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire have been making a significant contribution to a number of scientific fields. The muon facilities at ISIS consist of eight experimental areas. The European Commission Muon facility consists of three experimental areas with a fixed momentum (28 MeV c −1 ). The RIKEN-RAL facility has a variable momentum (17–90 MeV c −1 ) and a choice of negative or positive muons delivering muons to four experimental areas. There is also an area recently used for a muon ionization cooling experiment. In this paper, the ISIS pulsed muon facilities are reviewed, including the beam characteristics that could be useful for muography experiments. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Cosmic-ray muography’.

EMuS Muon Facility and Its Application in the Study of Magnetism

A muon facility—EMuS (Experimental Muon Source)—at China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) has been studied since 2007. CSNS, which is designed to deliver a proton beam power of 100 kW at Phase-I, and will serve multidisciplinary research based on neutron scattering techniques, has just completed construction, and is ready to open to general users from September 2018. As an additional platform to CSNS, EMuS aims to provide different muon beams for multiple applications, among which, magnetism study by μSR techniques is a core part. By using innovative designs, such as a long target in conical shape situating in superconducting capture solenoids and forward collection method, EMuS can provide very intense muon beams with a proton beam of 5 kW and 1.6 GeV, from surface muons, decay muons, and high momentum muons to slow muons. In this article, the design aspects of EMuS, including general design, target station, muon beamlines, and μSR spectrometer, as well as prospects for applications on magnetism studies, will be reviewed.

The RIKEN-RAL Muon Facility and the Application of Muons for Studies of Magnetic Properties of Nano-Materials

An overview of the RIKEN-RAL Muon Facility is reported. The RIKEN-RAL Muon Facility has been established at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in the UK in 1992 and started to be in used for material science studies from 1994 by applying intense pulsed muon beams. More than 380 publications have been published in international journals and more than 100 domestic and international collaborations have been organized. As an example of those collaborative studies, a preliminary result of one recent experimental study on the magnetism in gold nano-cluster is reported. Additionally, a recent computational result on a local effect induced by an injected muon is reported in order to show how the presence of the muon leads to a local deformation of the crystal structure, thus changing the muon’s own position in finding the final stopping site self consistently.

Muon Site Estimations by DFT Calculations in Metal and Insulating Systems

A way to estimate muon sites in materials is reported. Since the muon has a positive charge, one easiest and conventional way to estimate muon positions is to calculate minimum potential positions. We applied our developed method to estimate those potential minimum positions to some systems which have been studied by mons at the RIKEN-RAL Muon Facility and showed well defined muon-spin precession behavior in magnetically ordered states. Tentative calculation results by using the density functional theory are reported.