A muon collider would enable the big jump ahead in energy reach that is needed for a fruitful exploration of fundamental interactions. The challenges of producing muon collisions at high luminosity and 10 TeV centre of mass energy are being investigated by the recently-formed International Muon Collider Collaboration. This Review summarises the status and the recent advances on muon colliders design, physics and detector studies. The aim is to provide a global perspective of the field and to outline directions for future work.

Renewed international interest in muon colliders motivates the continued investigation of the impacts of beam-induced background on detector performance. This continues the effort initiated by the Muon Accelerator Program and carried out until 2017. The beam-induced background from muon decays directly impacts detector performance and must be mitigated by optimizing the overall machine design, with particular attention paid to the machine detector interface region. In order to produce beam-induced background events and to study their characteristics in coordination with the collider optimization, a flexible simulation approach is needed. To achieve this goal we have chosen to utilize the combination of LineBuilder and Monte Carlo FLUKA codes. We report the results of beam-induced background studies with these tools obtained for a 1.5 TeV center of mass energy collider configuration. Good agreement with previous simulations using the MARS15 code demonstrates that our choice of tools meet the accuracy and performance requirements to perform future optimization studies on muon collider designs.

The measurement of physics processes at new energy frontier experiments requires excellent spatial, time, and energy resolutions to resolve the structure of collimated high-energy jets. In a future Muon Collider, the beam-induced backgrounds (BIB) represent the main challenge in the design of the detectors and of the event reconstruction algorithms. The technology and the design of the calorimeters should be chosen to reduce the effect of the BIB, while keeping good physics performance. Several requirements can be inferred: i) high granularity to reduce the overlap of BIB particles in the same calorimeter cell; ii) excellent timing (of the order of 100 ps) to reduce the out-of-time component of the BIB; iii) longitudinal segmentation to distinguish the signal showers from the fake showers produced by the BIB; iv) good energy resolution (less than 10%/√E) to obtain good physics performance, as has been already demonstrated for conceptual particle flow calorimeters. Our proposal consists of a semi-homogeneous electromagnetic calorimeter based on lead fluoride crystals (PbF₂) read out by surface-mount UV-extended Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs): the Crilin calorimeter. In this paper, the performance of the Crilin calorimeter in the Muon Collider framework for hadron jets reconstruction has been analyzed. We report the characterisation of individual components together with the development of a small-scale prototype, consisting of 2 layers of 3 × 3 crystals each.

We revisit the description of inverse Compton scattering sources and the photon beams generated therein, emphasizing the behavior of their phase space density distributions and how they depend upon those of the two colliding beams of electrons and photons. The main objective is to provide practical formulas for bandwidth, spectral density, brilliance, which are valid in general for any value of the recoil factor, i.e. both in the Thomson regime of negligible electron recoil, and in the deep Compton recoil dominated region, which is of interest for gamma-gamma colliders and Compton sources for the production of multi-GeV photon beams. We adopt a description based on the center of mass reference system of the electron-photon collision, in order to underline the role of the electron recoil and how it controls the relativistic Doppler/boost effect in various regimes. Using the center of mass reference frame greatly simplifies the treatment, allowing us to derive simple formulas expressed in terms of rms momenta of the two colliding beams (emittance, energy spread, etc.) and the collimation angle in the laboratory system. Comparisons with Monte Carlo simulations of inverse Compton scattering in various scenarios are presented, showing very good agreement with the analytical formulas: in particular we find that the bandwidth dependence on the electron beam emittance, of paramount importance in Thomson regime, as it limits the amount of focusing imparted to the electron beam, becomes much less sensitive in deep Compton regime, allowing a stronger focusing of the electron beam to enhance luminosity without loss of mono-chromaticity. A similar effect occurs concerning the bandwidth dependence on the frequency spread of the incident photons: in deep recoil regime the bandwidth comes out to be much less dependent on the frequency spread. The set of formulas here derived are very helpful in designing inverse Compton sources in diverse regimes, giving a quite accurate first estimate in typical operational conditions for number of photons, bandwidth, spectral density and brilliance values—the typical figures of merit of such radiation sources.

In this paper, we present the generalities of the Compton interaction process; we analyse the different paradigms of Inverse Compton Sources, implemented or in commissioning phase at various facilities, or proposed as future projects. We present an overview of the state of the art, with a discussion of the most demanding challenges.