Fast cooling of muon beams will be needed for building either TeV muon colliders that might explore the electroweak gauge symmetry breaking or muon storage rings that could become ultrabright neutrino sources. Stochastic and electron cooling take longer than the muon lifetime, so attention has been focused on the potentially faster but less explored ionization cooling. Addressing recent concerns that excitation of Langmuir waves might be deleterious for ionization cooling techniques, we show that, while the hydrodynamic instability indeed might be dangerous, the waves are, in fact, stabilized through a combination of resistive and kinetic effects at a very modest emittance of the beam.

• Received 4 September 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.85.5575