ILC NewsLine
Around the World
Commission accomplished
Part three of a series on how the CESR storage ring turns into the CesrTA damping ring

CesrTA after the reconfiguration.
When you have a set of new hardware and a clear mission ahead of you, the first step to complete the mission is to commission the hardware. After reconfiguring their storage ring and light source CESR, Cornell University and the international ILC team working on damping ring studies switched on the machine in early October and performed the first electron cloud studies in the low emittance configuration in November. “It was an intense week and we have some very interesting new data,” says Mark Palmer, CesrTA project manager.
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-- Barbara Warmbein

Calendar

Upcoming meetings, conferences, workshops

8th SiLC Meeting
IFCA, Santander, Spain
17-19 December 2008

Accelerator Reliability Workshop
TRIUMF, Vancouver, Canada
26-30 January 2009


Upcoming school

The US Particle Accelerator School
Nashville, Tennessee, USA
12-23 January 2009


GDE Meetings calendar

View complete ILC calendar

Feature Story
Beauty lies within
New machine fixes the inner surface of cavities

First prototype of the placed inside a test piece for the iris portion of a cavity Photo: Nobu Toge
The inner surfaces of the niobium cavities for the International Linear Collider have to be polished to literally sparkle, since the smallest defects, such as bumps, pits, welding flaws or human-induced scratches on them are considered to be dominantly responsible for the deterioration of the cavity performance and can even lead to quenches and field emission. Many techniques and technologies have been studied and developed already to address this challenge. At the end of November, the first prototype of a new gadget developed with different approach was delivered to KEK.
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-- Rika Takahashi

Image of the Week
TPC spells out its first tracks

The prototype of a future time projection chamber (TPC) is tracking its first events in a 1-Tesla magnet and an electron test beam at DESY. This means that not only the detector prototype but also the EUDET test facility EUDET is now fully operational. The TPC is a truly global undertaking: the magnet is a contribution from KEK, a cosmic trigger hodoscope has been made in Saclay using SiPMs stabilised in temperature by Peltier devices, the beam trigger was brought by Nikhef, the mechanics of the endplate is from Cornell, the field cage and the gas and HV systems are from DESY, the detector (a Micromegas module) and the electronics are from Saclay. Keep reading NewsLine for updates.

In the News
From Nature
5 December 2008
Making Europe a better place for research
European Union unveils its vision for 2020
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From CERN
5 December 2008
LHC to restart in 2009
Geneva, 5 December 2008. CERN today confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will restart in 2009. This news forms part of an updated report, published today, on the status of the LHC following a malfunction on 19 September.
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From New Scientist
4 December 2008
Universe's dark matter mix is 'just right' for life
IT'S not just the nature of dark matter that's a mystery - even its abundance is inexplicable. But if our universe is just one of many possible universes, at least this conundrum can be explained.
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Director's Corner
A low-energy gamma-gamma collider as a first step toward the ILC?

Former KEK Director Hirotaka Sugawara
The International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC) met immediately after last month's International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) Seminar on future prospects for particle physics. The spirit of new ideas that prevailed at the ICFA meeting continued into the ILCSC meeting where Hirotaka Sugawara, former director general of KEK, Japan, presented a different approach towards the ILC. He suggested building a lower-energy gamma-gamma (γγ) machine as a first step towards the ILC. The ILCSC is now evaluating the pros and cons of this idea. They have asked both Research Director Sakue Yamada and me to do some homework to aid them in evaluating this suggestion.
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-- Barry Barish

Director's Corner Archive

Announcements
Where's Wally?
The LCWS / ILC 08 conference photo is now online! Download it here and see if you can find yourself in it. And don't forget to send your physics-related holiday photos or suggestions for the "What is it?" column to communicators@linearcollider.org!

arXiv preprints
0812.1229
SUSY Without Prejudice at Linear Colliders

0812.0925
ILC Beam Energy Measurement by means of Laser Compton Backscattering

EUDET Reports
2008-03
EUDET: Detector R&D Towards the International Linear Collider

2008-02
The EUDET High Resolution Pixel Telescope - Towards the Final Telescope

2008-01
The EUDET High Resolution Pixel Telescope