Newsline

Director's Corner

PAC meeting in Taiwan: a discussion of long-term issues

by Barry Barish

The ILC Program Advisory Committee met at Academia Sinica in Taiwan in May. In addition to their specific recommendations, they again urged development of a strategy for the post-2012 period, following completion of the accelerator Technical Design Report.

Feature

From symmetry magazine: Adventures of a light-source bum

I got involved in particle accelerators as a graduate student because I wanted to work in an area that had the potential to have a positive impact on people’s lives in 10 to 20 years. Near the end of my PhD studies, I attended a talk by Herman Winick, who introduced the audience to synchrotron radiation sources and the research going on at the SPEAR ring at what is now the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, SSRL.

 

Around the World

Achieving cavity resonance

DESY scientists fine-tune cavity frequencies

by Leah Hesla

Keeping accelerating cavities tuned to the right frequency requires continual, gentle hammering by a little device called a piezoelectric tuner. DESY scientists have mastered the art and science of applying the piezo to cavities, bringing them to within several ten-thousandths a percent of the desired frequency.

Image of the week

Cavities in stereo

Image: DESY

Users can take a virtual tour through the European XFEL tunnel, currently under construction, walking through the newly planned facilities to get an idea of its space and future working conditions.

The nine-cell structures of pure niobium are designed to speed up the electrons at DESY’s FLASH, the European XFEL, and the ILC. The picture was taken in DESY’s IPP stereo projection room, where it is possible to project and view three-dimensional models on a 1:1 scale.

In the News

  • from BBC News
    1 July 2011
    US particle physicists are inching closer to determining why the Universe exists in its current form, made overwhelmingly of matter.
  • from BBC News
    29 June 2011
    Unexplained “filaments” of radio-wave emission close to our galaxy’s centre may hold proof of the existence of dark matter, researchers have said.
  • from Fermilab
    24 June 2011
    Scientists of the MINOS experiment [...] announced [...] the results from a search for a rare phenomenon, the transformation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. The result is consistent with and significantly constrains a measurement reported 10 days ago by the Japanese T2K experiment…