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.

The study of collective effects in circular accelerators can be tackled by solving numerically the Vlasov equation or by using tracking codes. The two methods are obtained with different approaches: Vlasov solvers consider a continuous distribution function and describe the beam with coherent oscillation modes in frequency domain (ending up usually with an eigenvalue system to solve), while tracking codes use macroparticles and wakefields in time domain. In this paper we present two Vlasov solvers for the study of collective effects (from impedances/wakefields only) which evaluate the frequency shift of coherent oscillation modes and possible mode coupling instability in the single-bunch case for both longitudinal and transverse planes. In the longitudinal plane the Vlasov solver also takes into account the potential well distortion due to the wakefields under some conditions. In parallel to this theoretical approach, tracking codes, which include collective effects, have been used as benchmark. In particular, starting from their results, we also propose a new method to study the frequency shift of coherent modes and compare it with the output of the Vlasov solvers.

The High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) project aims at extending the operability of the LHC by another decade and increasing by more than a factor of ten the integrated luminosity that the LHC will have collected by the end of Run 3. This will require doubling the beam intensity and reducing the transverse beam size compared to those of the LHC design. The higher beam brightness poses new challenges for machine safety, due to the large energy of 700 MJ stored in the beams, and for beam stability, mainly due to the collimator contribution to the total LHC beam coupling impedance. A rich research program was therefore started to identify suitable materials and collimator designs, not only fulfilling impedance reduction requirements but also granting adequate beam-cleaning and robustness against failures. The use of thin molybdenum coatings on a molybdenum–graphite substrate has been identified as the most promising solution to meet both collimation and impedance requirements, and it is now the baseline choice of the HL-LHC project. In this work we present the main results of the coating characterization, in particular addressing the impact of coating microstructure on the electrical resistivity with different techniques, from Direct Current (DC) to GHz frequency range.

Landau damping is an essential mechanism for ensuring collective beam stability in particle accelerators. Precise knowledge of the strength of Landau damping is key to making accurate predictions on beam stability for state-of-the-art high-energy colliders. In this Letter, we demonstrate an experimental procedure that would allow quantifying the strength of Landau damping and the limits of beam stability using an active transverse feedback as a controllable source of beam coupling impedance. In a proof-of-principle test performed at the Large Hadron Collider, stability diagrams for a range of Landau octupole strengths have been measured. In the future, the procedure could become an accurate way of measuring stability diagrams throughout the machine cycle.

A resistive transverse damper is often needed in particle accelerators operating with many bunches and it is usually very efficient as it can considerably reduce the necessary amount of nonlinearities needed to reach beam stability through Landau damping. In the CERN LHC for instance, the required current in the Landau octupoles is predicted to be reduced by an order of magnitude for zero chromaticity (for the beam and machine parameters used during the last year of Run 2, in 2018, this corresponded to $\sim 2000\mathrm{A}$ without damper and $\sim 200\mathrm{A}$ with damper, knowing that the maximum current available in the Landau octupoles is $\sim 550\mathrm{A}$). However, a resistive transverse damper also destabilizes the single-bunch motion below the transverse mode coupling instability intensity threshold (for zero chromaticity), introducing a new kind of instability, which has been called ITSR instability (for imaginary tune split and repulsion). Until now, only one type of impedance-driven transverse coherent instability has been explained for a single bunch in a circular particle accelerator, at zero chromaticity and without a multiturn wake: the transverse mode coupling instability. A transverse mode coupling instability can also be observed in the presence of Landau damping, beam-beam, electron cloud or space charge. However, the ITSR instability exhibits a different mechanism, which is not due to mode coupling. The purpose of this article is to explain in detail both this new instability mechanism and its mitigation using a simplified analytical model, which has been carefully benchmarked, using the pyheadtail macroparticle tracking code, by Oeftiger (one of the code’s developers).