Newsline

Author archive: Perrine Royole-Degieux

ILC bloggers join Quantum Diaries

| 2 April 2009 One is Australian, the other German. Both are physicist willing to share their everyday lives as particle physicists working on the ILC project. Together with eight other diarists, they joined the new Quantum Diaries blog launched on 31 March 2009. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

ECal: a piece of the jigsaw reaches a milestone

| 5 February 2009 Hundreds of millions of channels of electronics: this is about what the electromagnetic calorimeter (ECal) of the CALICE collaboration will have to design, process and analyse. The very high granularity of ILC detector’s future calorimeter will also be reflected in the ambitious first-stage electronics – or very-front-end electronics, which still needs to be designed. One part of the electronic jigsaw is the analogue-to-digital converter (ADC). At LPC, a CNRS/IN2P3 lab in Clermont-Ferrand, France, the latest ADC prototype fulfills the ILC requirements in terms of resolution, compactness, time of conversion and power consumption. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

IDAG prepares to review Letters of Intent

| 4 December 2008 The International Detector Advisory Group (IDAG) met for the second time during the LCWS08 meeting which took place in Chicago two weeks ago. In a few days, they succeeded to converge on the strategy they will use to evaluate the ILC detectors concepts. At the end of March 2009, they will receive the Letters of Intent (LOIs) for the detector concepts and start reviewing them. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

LHC and ILC communications

| 14 August 2008 There it is: the LHC will start up in four weeks! We know the date of this special day when the protons will be injected into the tunnel: 10 September 2008. All eyes are on the LHC… but not exclusively. The start-up event as well as many other events which will follow are unique opportunities to promote our field, particle physics and science in general. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

Rolf Heuer’s vision of particle physics in Europe

| 10 July 2008 The future Director-General of CERN Rolf Heuer, currently Research Director at DESY, presented his personal vision of the future of particle physics in Europe at the ILC-ECFA meeting in Warsaw, Poland. Heuer emphasised the exciting times the community is now entering with the LHC start-up. The exploration of our mysterious "Dark Universe" is the main motivation for present and future astronomy and particle physics projects, and with the LHC and its highest collision energy ever, we are on the verge to explore it. After reviewing many possible scenarios and options for the after-LHC phase, Heuer said he hoped that particle physics research will continue with the same momentum for future projects, in particular for a future e+-e- collider. He hopes that the community will make use of these exciting times to establish a sustainable and global partnership between the labs, "of which CERN could be the catalyst." Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Michel Davier chairs the International Detector Advisory Group

| 13 March 2008 Michel Davier, senior French physicist at LAL and Professor at University Paris-Sud 11, will chair the International Detector Advisory Group (IDAG) of the ILC project. “It is an honour for me to serve the ILC project, especially in this particularly interesting stage when the experimental landscape is being established,” says Davier. He has worked on electron-positron colliders for more than 30 years and he was LAL director for ten years in the eighties. Playing a leading role in particle physics in France, especially within the CELLO (DESY), ALEPH (CERN) and BaBar (SLAC) experiment collaborations, he is also a member of the French Academy of Sciences. In another aspect of his scientific career, he has been one of the leaders of the French-Italian Virgo project aiming at the detection of gravitational waves with a giant interferometer, thus sharing common scientific background with Global Design Effort Director Barry Barish, former director of the LIGO project in the US. Category: Feature | Tagged:

ILC meets the CLIC team

| 28 February 2008 After the Large Hadron Collider, the science community agrees that particle physicists will need an electron-positron linear collider to fully understand and discover the potential new science at high energy regimes. Apart from the International Linear Collider - whose ‘cold’ accelerating technology is based on superconducting radiofrequency cavities – another variant of an electron collider, based on a warm accelerating technology is under study: the Compact Linear Collider Study (CLIC). The two teams held a meeting at CERN on 8 February to investigate the connections between the two projects and to list potential cooperative efforts on common activities. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

ILC challenges materials science

| 6 December 2007 Physicists and engineers already know most of the empirical recipes to build very good accelerating cavities: highly pure niobium is essential, welding needs to be carefully controlled and surfaces undergo advanced cleaning and annealing procedures. But, as for every complex system, a lot of phenomena remain unexplained. The theoretical limits of RF superconductivity are not well known, and engineers also meet practical limitations to reach high gradients. Accelerator experts work very closely with material scientists to understand cavity properties better. Category: Feature | Tagged:

More scientists read ILC NewsLine, survey says… …and they want more physics stories!

| 21 November 2007 Last September, the ILC communicators conducted a survey about your favourite newsletter. Who are its readers? Are they satisfied with the content? Survey answers that you are mostly scientists who would like more stories about physics. Unfortunately, many of you do not know how to get your stories into NewsLine yet. Category: Feature | Tagged:

TPC: a digital breakthrough

| 1 November 2007 Digitisation - a key word that could lead to smaller and simpler detectors. Two weeks ago, at Saclay, France, the CEA Time Projection Chamber group of Paul Colas proved it could build a digital TPC for the ILC. A truly collaborative effort, this breakthrough could significantly reduce the cost and simplify the implementation of this sub-detector. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , , , , ,