  We discuss the design of the muon capture front end of the neutrino factory
International Design Study. In the front end, a proton bunch on a target
creates secondary pions that drift into a capture transport channel, decaying
into muons. A sequence of rf cavities forms the resulting muon beams into
strings of bunches of differing energies, aligns the bunches to (nearly) equal
central energies, and initiates ionization cooling. The muons are then
accelerated to high energy where their decays provide neutrino beams. For the
International Design Study (IDS), a baseline design must be developed and
optimized for an engineering and cost study. We present a baseline design that
can be used to establish the scope of a future neutrino Factory facility.
