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Director's Corner

The International Linear Collider Steering Committee plans for the future

by Barry Barish

The International Linear Collider Steering Committee, chaired by Jon Bagger, met at Oxford University on 2 February. The main order of business was to plan the future of the ILC effort, following completion of the Technical Design Report.

Around the World

From Symmetry Breaking: Scientists put detectors to the test, a few particles at a time

At the Fermilab Test Beam Facility, scientists from around the world line up to test new detector technologies that will help shape the future of particle physics. Whether experimenters need a few pions or lots of protons, the FTBF can deliver: It offers the only high-energy hadron test beam in the United States. It is a proving ground for particle detector designs being developed for experiments at accelerator laboratories in the United States, Europe and Japan. Last year alone, the facility accommodated 13 experiments. In the future, it might even host detector tests for medical imaging applications.

Read the full story

Around the World

ILC beyond the technical design

by Rika Takahashi

Realising a big international project such as International Linear Collider involves many issues beyond finalising the technical design. The Advanced Accelerator Association promoting science and technology, Japan's industry-academia collaboration towards the realisation of the ILC, recently published a report to address such issues.

Image of the week

Ghosts in the tunnel

Image: Dirk Noelle

Visitors ramble where electrons will one day whizz: a large number of people working at DESY and the European XFEL were treated to a rare trip underground into the recently completed but still completely empty tunnel for the European XFEL. And empty tunnels make for good images.

Read more about the European-XFEL tunnel

In the News

  • from Interactions
    8 March 2012
    Theta one-three, the last mixing angle to be precisely measured, expresses how electron neutrinos and their antineutrino counterparts mix and change into the other flavors. The Daya Bay collaboration’s first results indicate that sin2 2 θ13, is equal to 0.092 plus or minus 0.017.
  • from Fermilab
    7 March 2012
    New measurements announced today by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory indicate that the elusive Higgs boson may nearly be cornered. After analyzing the full data set from the Tevatron accelerator, which completed its last run in September 2011, the two independent experiments see hints of a Higgs boson.
  • from CERN
    5 March 2012
    “The LHCb result on Bs decaying to two muons pushes our knowledge of the Standard Model to an unprecedented level and tells us the maximum amount of New Physics we can expect, if any, in this very rare decay.”
  • from Fermilab
    2 March 2012
    The world’s most precise measurement of the mass of the W boson, one of nature’s elementary particles, has been achieved by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
  • from Physics Today
    March 2012
    The kind of neutrinos emitted in nuclear beta decay—namely electron antineutrinos—are helping scientists implement a diverse range of intriguing applications beyond fundamental particle-physics research.