Compact tunable plasma muon accelerator for ultrashort micron-scale muon pair beams*

Experimentally accessible schemes of compact plasma muon acceleration are introduced and modeled using a novel technique of controlled post-processing of cascade showers. These schemes use propagating structures in plasma, driven as wakefields of femtosecond-scale high-intensity laser or dense particle beams, to capture muons of a divergent cascade shower of: (a) hadronic type from proton-nucleon or photo-production reactions or, (b) electromagnetic type. Apart from the direct trapping and acceleration of particles of a raw shower in a plasma wakefield, a conditioning stage is proposed to selectively focus only one of the charge states. Not only is the high gradient of plasma acceleration structures well suited for rapid acceleration to extend the lifetime of short-lived muons but their inherent spatiotemporal scales also make possible production of unprecedented ultrashort, micron-scale muon beams. Compact muon acceleration schemes hold the promise to open up new avenues for applications.