The international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE), which is under construction at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), will demonstrate the principle of ionization cooling as a technique for the reduction of the phase-space volume occupied by a muon beam. Ionization cooling channels are required for the Neutrino Factory and the Muon Collider. MICE will evaluate in detail the performance of a single lattice cell of the Feasibility Study 2 cooling channel. The MICE Muon Beam has been constructed at the ISIS synchrotron at RAL, and in MICE Step I, it has been characterized using the MICE beam-instrumentation system. In this paper, the MICE Muon Beam and beam-line instrumentation are described. The muon rate is presented as a function of the beam loss generated by the MICE target dipping into the ISIS proton beam. For a 1 V signal from the ISIS beam-loss monitors downstream of our target we obtain a 30 KHz instantaneous muon rate, with a neglible pion contamination in the beam.

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The ablation pressure at a 0.44-microm laser wavelength has been measured at irradiance up to 2 x 10(14) W/cm(2). The diagnostics consisted in the detection of shock breakout from stepped Al targets. By adopting large focal spots and smoothed laser beams, the lateral energy transport and "drilling effects" have been avoided. The measured scaling shows a fair agreement with analytical models.

A monodimensional amplified spontaneous emission model of traveling-wave pumped soft-x-ray lasers in transient collisional excitation ͑TCE͒ is presented. The model explicitly includes the influence of the local gain on the group velocity of the x-ray pulses propagating in the active medium and the saturation of the amplified x-ray signal. Complete analytical solutions of the model in a number of physically interesting cases are derived. The important parameters governing the behavior of these lasers are identified, their influence on the output is investigated, and the optimum configuration required in experiments for efficient traveling-wave pumping is discussed for conditions typical of soft-x-ray lasers in the TCE regime.

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