Hybrid methods for muon accelerator simulations with ionization cooling

Muon ionization cooling involves passing particles through solid or liquid absorbers. Careful simulations are required to design muon cooling channels. New features have been developed for inclusion in the transfer map code COSY Infinity to follow the distribution of charged particles through matter. To study the passage of muons through material, the transfer map approach alone is not sufficient. The interplay of beam optics and atomic processes must be studied by a hybrid transfer map-Monte-Carlo approach in which transfer map methods describe the deterministic behavior of the particles, and Monte-Carlo methods are used to provide corrections accounting for the stochastic nature of scattering and straggling of particles. The advantage of the new approach is that the vast majority of the dynamics are represented by fast application of the high-order transfer map of an entire element and accumulated stochastic effects. The gains in speed are expected to simplify the optimization of cooling channels which is usually computationally demanding. Progress on the development of the required algorithms and their application to modeling muon ionization cooling channels is reported.