A new method to produce a negative muon beam of keV energies

A method is described by which muons are decelerated from MeV kinetic energies to energies below 50 keV inside a magnetic focusing device (cyclotron trap) and then extracted by an electric field into a magnetic guiding channel. Test measurements were performed which resulted in about 104/s extracted negative muons, in reasonable agreement with Monte-Carlo simulations. Using this method, muon beams in the energy range of 10–50 keV with intensities up to 105 μ−/s will be available in the near future.