Barbara Warmbein | 8 January 2009The majority of NewsLine readers are scientists – most of you of the experimental kind. So be honest: how often during the last few weeks, when listening to carols, plucking the strings of your old guitar that you only get out during the holidays or cringing at a dissonant brass band, did you think about the physics and the maths of music? Go to the ILCT-MDB Horizontal Test Stand at Fermilab now and you can experience a perfect third harmonic: that of a string of cavities being tested and assembled into a cryomodule.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cryomodule, cryomodule string, Fermilab, horizontal test stand, United States
26 November 2008Nearly a half-century ago, researchers at Stanford University began investigating superconducting RF (SRF) acceleration. They would not have been surprised to learn that by 1994, SRF had come into large-scale use in Jefferson Lab's Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, or that by 2008 it was planned as the enormous, ultra-cold, dynamic-but-delicate heart of the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC). Nor would they be surprised to learn that this complex technology's challenges nevertheless continue to vex accelerator builders. In my view, it's time for the accelerator community to go back to where the pioneers at Stanford began, hit the pause button, and take a careful look at more than four decades of SRF R&D.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cavity gradient, JLab, Nobel prize, SRF technology
Barbara Warmbein | 13 November 2008The time projection chamber is part of the tracker system of a future ILD detector at the ILC and will one day reproduce highly precise tracks of the particles that passed through its gas. A plot of all the tracks leading to a workshop called ‘the tent’ on the DESY campus would make for an interesting event display: in the course of the last weeks many parts for the detector prototype arrived from destinations around the world, together with their experts. While field cage, cathode and module dummies came from Germany, the anode endplate travelled all the way from Cornell University in the States. France brought a Micromegas readout module, Belgium contributed the trigger logic and the Netherlands the beam trigger equipment for the coming test with cosmic rays or test beam.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, detector R&D, ILD, time projection chamber, TPC
Barbara Warmbein | 6 November 2008More than 1034 times per second per square centimetre — that’s how often electrons and positrons are supposed to collide in the ILC. The project’s accelerator experts have no doubts that it can be done, but they have to demonstrate it, too. An important proof is to run ILC-like beam conditions through a radiofrequency (RF) unit that consists of one klystron and 26 superconducting cavities housed in three cryomodules. Running ILC-like beam conditions means running the cavities at their gradient limits and with 800-microsecond beam pulses with an average current of about nine milliamperes (or mA). The FLASH accelerator at DESY is capable of approaching these ILC-like beam conditions, but they are at the design limits of the machine and are well beyond typical operating conditions. An international team with members from DESY, FNAL, SLAC, KEK, and Argonne have come together for a series of tests that wants to drive an ILC-like beam through FLASH.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, FLASH
16 October 2008The third SiD Workshop this year, hosted from 17 to 19 September by the University of Colorado at Boulder, marked an important milestone on SiD's way to the Letter of Intent (LOI): the collaboration froze its detector’s global parameters. The meeting was opened by Barry Barish, who reminded everyone that the "science remains the key to ultimate success" of the ILC programme and that detector development was critical. Given the difficult times for ILC funding both for accelerators and detectors, the meeting included updates on the current funding situation worldwide and on the status in France, Japan, the UK and the US. SiD additionally invited two guest speakers, Howard Nicholson from the US Department of Energy Office of High Energy Physics and Marvin Goldberg from the National Science Foundation, to give the audience an update of the US situation and the view from Washington.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: SiD, SiD parameters
Rika Takahashi | 9 October 2008This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to a Japanese-born American and two Japanese particle physicists: Yoichiro Nambu, professor emeritus at University of Chicago, for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, Makoto Kobayashi, professor emeritus at KEK and executive director of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Toshihide Maskawa, professor at Kyoto Sangyo University in Kyoto, for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, Nobel prize
Barbara Warmbein | 2 October 2008The scientists working on the International Large Detector concept ILD had met for the second time this year to discuss the set-up of their future masterpiece. The ILD group formed about a year ago from the former GLD and LDC detector concept groups. Both concepts had their plans for trackers, calorimeters and the detector set-up as a whole.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: ILD
Barbara Warmbein | 4 September 2008There are many official stages to a project financed by the European Commission – from call, proposal, negotiations, contract draft, start of work, annual reports to one of the most official events: the kick-off meeting. Europe's new flagship project on cavity production and exploration of international governance structures, ILC-HiGrade took this step last week. Representatives form all eight work packages were at DESY to present their objectives, their to-do lists and the milestones already achieved.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, Europe, ILC HiGrade
