Newsline

Director's Corner

Moving towards one linear collider project

by Barry Barish

There are two very different technical approaches to implementing a future TeV-scale linear collider. The International Linear Collider is based on a superconducting radiofrequency main linac, while the Compact Linear Collider uses a two-beam acceleration concept. How will this lead to a single linear collider project?

Research Director's Report

The Higgs mandate

This month’s Research Director’s Report was written by Hitoshi Yamamoto, co-chair of the Worldwide Study and regional detector contact for Asia

by Hitoshi Yamamoto

One of the primary goals of the next global ILC workshop in Daegu, Korea, in April 2012 is to clarify the physics mandate of the ILC corresponding to narrowed-down physics scenarios, based in particular on LHC results from the Higgs boson search.

Feature

International forum reviews linear collider physics case

by Perrine Royole-Degieux

The international community of theorists and experimentalists working on ILC and CLIC is convinced of the strong physics case for a generic linear collider. More than one hundred of them gathered at DESY last week for three days of intense discussions and review of the different physics scenarios. Two papers are now under way and will be finalised by this summer. In the meantime the input from the whole particle physics community will be very welcome.

Image of the week

Japanese civil engineers visit DESY and CERN

Image: Hans-Joachim Christ, DESY

A delegation from the Japanese Society of Civil Engineering visited the European labs CERN and DESY this month to learn about how the laboratories run their projects.

In the News

  • from Nature
    14 February 2012
    Several basic-research programmes are trimmed, including nuclear physics and high-energy physics, a shift that is consistent with the administration’s emphasis on applied research that is most relevant to energy technology.

    “Basic research is systematically down,” says Milind Diwan, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and co-spokesman for a planned particle physics experiment that received a drop in funding. “Those of us in fundamental-research have to live within those priorities.”

  • from BBC News
    14 February 2012
    The boost should improve the collider’s chances of discovering “new physics” and definitively confirming or denying the existence of Higgs boson particle.

    The proton beams’ energies will be increased by 14%, for a total collision energy of 8 trillion electron volts.

  • from Science
    13 February 2012
    The news for high-energy physicists may be even worse. The budget for such research, which explores fundamental particles and forces primarily through particle collisions, would fall 1.8% to $777 million. That sounds like a mere haircut, but the effect at the United States’ last dedicated particle physics laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, could be momentous. “At first blush, it looks like a fairly disastrous budget,” says Fermilab Director Pier Oddone.
  • from CERN
    13 February 2012
    It is accompanied by a strategy to optimise LHC running to deliver the maximum possible amount of data in 2012 before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running. The data target for 2012 is 15 inverse femtobarns for ATLAS and CMS, three times higher than in 2011.
  • from IPMU
    13 February 2012
    Galaxies have no definite “edges”, the new research concludes. Instead galaxies have long outskirts of dark matter that extend to their nearby galaxies; the inter-galactic space is not empty but filled with dark matter