Daniele Calzolari

The Muon Collider is one of the most promising future collider facilities with the potential to reach multi-TeV center-of-mass energy and high luminosity. Due to the significant Higgs boson production cross section in muon-antimuon collisions at such high energies, the collider offers an excellent opportunity for in-depth exploration of Higgs boson properties. It holds the capability to significantly advance our understanding of the Higgs sector to a very high level of precision. However, the presence of beam-induced background resulting from the decay of the beam muons poses unique challenges for detector development and event reconstruction. In this paper, the prospects for measuring various Higgs boson properties at a center-of-mass energy of 3 TeV are presented, using a detailed detector simulation in a realistic environment. The study demonstrates the feasibility of achieving high precision results with the current state-of-the-art detector design. In addition, the paper discusses the detector requirements necessary to achieve this level of accuracy.

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.

Laser-driven radiation sources are attracting increasing attention for several materials science applications. While laser-driven ions, electrons and neutrons have already been considered to carry out the elemental characterization of materials, the possibility to exploit high-energy photons remains unexplored. Indeed, the electrons generated by the interaction of an ultra-intense laser pulse with a near-critical material can be turned into high-energy photons via bremsstrahlung emission when shot into a high-Z converter. These photons could be effectively exploited to perform Photon Activation Analysis (PAA). In the present work, laser-driven PAA is proposed and investigated. We develop a theoretical approach to identify the optimal experimental conditions for laser-driven PAA in a wide range of laser intensities. Lastly, exploiting the Monte Carlo and Particle-In-Cell tools, we successfully simulate PAA experiments performed with both conventional accelerators and laser-driven sources. Under high repetition rate operation (i.e. 1−10 Hz) conditions, the ultra-intense lasers can allow performing PAA with performances comparable with those achieved with conventional accelerators. Moreover, laser-driven PAA could be exploited jointly with complementary laser-driven materials characterization techniques under investigation in existing laser facilities.