The discovery of neutrino mass through experimental evidence of neutrino oscillations
at the end of the last century has provided the first proof that the Standard
Model of particle physics is incomplete. To be able to extend the Standard
Model to incorporate massive neutrinos first requires many theoretical uncertainties
surrounding the particle and its interactions to be understood. Therefore, a
dedicated experimental programme is needed over the coming decades to provide
precision measurements of the neutrino oscillation parameters and also a possible
measurement of CP violation in the lepton sector, which could have astrophysical
consequences.
An intense source of neutrinos is required to achieve these precision measurements
and the leading contender proposed to provide this neutrino beam, is the Neutrino
Factory. Before a Neutrino Factory facility can be realised, a number of technological
challenges need to be evaluated and understood first. One of which, is reduce the
large phase space volume (emittance) of the initial muon beam, which is eventually
stored and through decay provides the neutrino beam. Ionisation cooling is the
chosen method to achieve this and the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE)
at Rutherford Laboratory in the UK, is required to demonstrate ionisation cooling
and its feasibility for a Neutrino Factory.
To demonstrate ionisation cooling, a section of a cooling channel will be constructed
and single-particle measurements of emittance of a muon beam before and after the
cooling channel from particle spectrometers will be compared. To measure emittance
accurately requires precision measurements of the momenta and spatial coordinates
at the spectrometers by tracking devices in a uniform magnetic field. The focus
of this thesis is based around the construction and testing of the MICE tracker(s),
including a study of its simulated performance and also construction and testing of a prototype.