GPS Developments

Within the High Intensity Muon Beam (HIMB) Project, PSI is aiming to strongly enhance the available muon intensity in the two secondary beamlines attached to target M.  One necessity to fully exploit the high muon rates for µSR is the ability to identify the lateral stopping coordinates of a muon in the sample region and the corresponding decay positron from that muon. A detector system that is able to perform this vertex reconstruction (see here) will be first developed for GPS.

Such a detection scheme would allow a few advanced µSR measurements schemes, including:

•  Measuring much smaller samples by considering only muons stopping within the small sample area and suppressing background from muons landing outside.

• Performing µSR measurements at a much higher rate, breaking the limit on incoming muons rate dictated by the length of the data gate and pileup.

• Measuring with long (20 µs) data gate as the positron background is much reduced and therefore combining high time resolution with low background, overcoming any advantages of pulsed muon beams without sacrificing rate.

• Performing µSR measurements on multiple (small) samples in parallel. This can be done by associating the position of an incoming muons with a sample that is placed in the corresponding area.