Matter and anti-matter are believed to have been created in equal amounts when the universe came in to existence during the Big Bang, yet in the universe today there is only matter.

The quest to understand more about the mysterious neutrino particle which is thought to be responsible for this phenomenon has taken a major step forward. The Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) project, an accelerator research experiment for a major component of a future Neutrino Factory, has achieved an important milestone with the successful transport of a beam of muon particles along the MICE muon beam.

Observations of atmospheric and solar neutrinos have shown that they change state (oscillate), between three forms - electron, tau and muon - during their journey across the Earth or from the Sun to the Earth. This discovery is extremely significant since oscillations can only occur if neutrinos have mass and yet the Standard Model of particle physics, on which our current understanding of how our universe was created and is held together rests, assumes that neutrinos have no mass.

The fact that neutrinos change state implies that they have mass and therefore that the Standard Model is wrong or incomplete. Results from experiments such as those from the SuperKamiokaNDE experiment in Japan and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada detecting atmospheric neutrinos produced by cosmic rays, as well as neutrinos from the Sun, discovered that neutrinos do have mass after all.

To study the mysterious neutrino in detail requires a new way of generating very high intensity beams of high energy neutrinos of known characteristics (composition, energy) by storing muons in a decay ring with long straight sections pointing to large detectors hundreds or thousands of kilometres away.

A Neutrino Factory is the answer. The Neutrino Factory will allow experiments of exquisite precision to be mounted, thus allowing the characteristics of the neutrino to be explored with unprecedented accuracy, reshaping our understanding of the structure of nature and the forces that bind it together.

Studies have shown that such a Neutrino Factory can be built, but that there are a number of technical challenges to be solved before a technical design can be completed. A major challenge is presented by the fact that muons decay in about 2 millionths of a second and ionisation cooling is the only technique that can cool the muons fast enough, enabling muon beams of the required intensity to be delivered by the Neutrino Factory.

Professor Ken Long of Imperial College London, and spokesperson for MICE UK, said, "Observing the first particles to pass through the MICE Muon Beam was an immensely exciting moment and represents the culmination of a fantastic, international team effort. It really marks the end of the beginning; we can now begin to tune up the beam and work towards the demonstration of ionisation cooling."

The technologies required for ionisation cooling will be demonstrated by MICE proving that muons can be assembled into ‘bunches’ in which the muons are going in the same direction and have roughly the same energy. Such 'cold' bunches can be made of small enough size to allow the muon beam to be accelerated and stored.

The MICE project is a major collaboration involving scientists and engineers from across the world, with collaborators in UK, the US, Switzerland, Italy, Bulgaria, The Netherlands, China and Japan. The UK teams include the Science and Technology Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and Daresbury Laboratory (DL). The collaboration is designing, building and testing a section of realistic cooling channel on a beam line on the ISIS facility at RAL.

Achieving this will give confidence that a full ionisation cooling channel, consisting of a large number of cooling sections, can be designed and built economically. In order to demonstrate the cooling performance, it will be necessary to characterise the muon beam going in and out of the cooling section with unprecedented accuracy.

Professor Alain Blondel of University of Geneva, Switzerland, MICE Collaboration Spokesperson said, "Developing new particle accelerator technologies is vital for progress in science in general and particle physics in particular. The MICE collaboration was set-up in 2001 to demonstrate ionisation cooling, which has never been done before, with the hope of seeing first beam in 2004. As usual things have taken longer than expected, with many political, financial, technical and even human difficulties. The collaboration has held together beautifully, everybody pulling their end and working very hard, with the tireless support from our big funding agencies, RAL and the ISIS team. Congratulations and gratitude should go to all of them. The recent successes represent the first small steps in our still long march towards the demonstration of ionisation cooling in 2010."

Dr Andrew Taylor, Director ISIS added, "The high intensity proton synchrotron that we use as the driver for the ISIS neutron source could not have been possible without the development and research within the particle physics community over the past decades.

It's a great pleasure to be able to return the favour and use ISIS as a test bed for the development of key technologies that are steps on the way to building a Neutrino Factory that may one day be built on the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory."