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Author archive: Barbara Warmbein

Committed to committees

| 1 November 2007 As the new chair of the ILC Steering Committee (ILCSC), Enzo Iarocci will have to do a lot of negotiating. Not only with the other members of the Steering Committee or the ILC community, but most of all with his wife. “In this new position I will have to probably travel even more than I thought,” he says, “and my wife is less than pleased about that...” Category: Around the World | Tagged: ,

Telescope arms open wide

| 18 October 2007 The EUDET telescope, a high-precision device that lets detector developers check the accuracy of their prototype by using particle beams and the EUDET telescope and comparing with accurately its determined tracks, has just finished a marathon in test beams around Europe. During six weeks in beams at DESY and CERN its makers tested it to the core and are now happy to pass their instrument on to users. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

On the way to the forum

| 11 October 2007 Many scientists working on ILC detector simulation know: Mokka can give you sleepless nights. This has nothing to do with caffeine, however - Mokka is a software that lets you run full simulations of events in future ILC detectors. It uses the Geant4 simulation tool, and ILC detector people around the world use it – and struggle with it sometimes. If you’re one of those people and are looking for answers (or maybe you want to share a particularly interesting line of code?), the website forum may be the right place for you. Category: Around the World | Tagged:

LDC and GLD become ILD

| 27 September 2007 Scientists are a self-organised and democratic lot. As such, they like bottom-up approaches: ask everybody involved, test all options and find the best and most logical consensus. The most recent example of this approach is the cooperation between the two detector concepts the Large Detector Concept and the Global Large Detector. Starting from first ideas during LCWS in Hamburg this summer, the two groups decided to combine their concepts into one and write a common Letter of Intent. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Lesson-Learning from CMS

| 13 September 2007 Alain Hervé already has the experience of building two enormous detectors under his belt, and it looks like he is going to help in a third one. Technical coordinator at CERN of both L3 at LEP and CMS at the LHC, the Breton has now been called as an expert to help in the interaction region design, cavern and detector assembly planning for the ILC and its detectors. He is taking part in preparatory phone conferences for the IRENG workshop and co-convenes Work Group A that looks at how to design, install and open experiments. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , ,

Live from the test beam: calorimetry rises from the ashes

| 30 August 2007 This summer, a stage was all the world for some of the men and women of the CALICE collaboration. For the first time, the full prototypes of the electromagnetic calorimeter, the hadronic calorimeter and the tailcatcher and muon tracker (designed and built by international collaborations and assembled in Paris, Hamburg and Northern Illinois respectively) played lead roles in the SPS test beam at CERN. In more than two months, the collaboration collected more than 100 million events, nearly 14 terabytes of data, thus not only testing their prototypes but also the data grid. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Getting the interaction point right

| 16 August 2007 Like the rest of society, the ILC community is split into two categories: the early risers and the night owls. Workshop organiser Andrei Seryi considers himself a night owl. Nevertheless he is up at 5 and in the lab at 6 am many days per week these weeks, holding phone meetings with the rest of the world. Some hundred specialists are already extremely busy preparing for the ILC interaction region engineering design workshop, or IRENG07, at SLAC in September. Their goal: to have all the facts together to take important decisions for the ILC’s interaction region. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

High grades for HiGrade

| 2 August 2007 It’s the age of electronic mail, but in the last weeks Eckhard Elsen from DESY took several trips per day to his snail mail in-tray down the corridor because he was waiting for an important letter. Then finally a letter and an email arrived from Brussels saying that contract negotiations for a six-lab proposal managed by Elsen will start soon. ILC-HiGrade, or “International Linear Collider and High Gradient Superconducting RF-Cavities” is a proposal for the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), which is asked to prepare for contract negotiations with a funding sum of up to five million Euros. Category: Feature | Tagged:

Mapping a magnet

| 26 July 2007 Three pairs of eyes cast one last look around the room. Have all scissors, ladders, metallic tables been removed? No pins or pens lying around anymore? Once the team is sure that nothing is left in the area, they close the security doors and give the go-ahead – the magnet that has been to space can be charged for the first time since its arrival at its new home in the DESY test beam. Before its field of 1 Tesla can bend the tracks of particles in a EUDET detector prototype, however, the scientists have to map the field very precisely. And they don't want steel-capped boots flying into the coil. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

EUDET’s Telescope

| 28 June 2007 Those scientists who develop detectors know a few magic words. Test beam is one, chip is one, DAQ is one. Telescope is another – and a prototype of one of these detector R&D ‘wands’ has just been tested in DESY’s 6-GeV electron beam as part of EUDET’s ‘Joint Research Activity 1’. EUDET is a Europe-funded and Europe-wide project for detector R&D, and one of its core activities is to test beam infrastructures – which include the telescope. It was also the first real test beam since the start of this EUDET activity. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,