Barbara Warmbein | 14 August 2008Good news from an experimental hall at the edge of the prairie: Fermilab's ILC test area in the 'New Muon Lab' (NML) has just taken a major step towards completion with the installation of the first cryomodule on 6 August.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cryomodule, Fermilab, NML
7 August 2008The Linear Collider Forum of America (LCFOA) held an ILC industrialisation meeting and briefing for Congressional staffers on Capitol Hill on 29 July. The briefing was attended by 46 persons from universities, industry, and laboratories and Congressional staff. About half of the attendees were Congressional staffers. The objective of the briefing was to emphasise the importance of a strong industrialisation component within the Americas Regional Team's Technical Design effort, describe other potential benefits of the ILC technologies for industry and the country, and to recommend the economic and educational benefits of siting the ILC at a U.S. site during the Technical Design phase timeframe to the U.S. audience.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: industrialisation, LCFOA, Linear Collider Forum of America, United States
Rika Takahashi | 7 August 2008A day before Japanese cabinet reshuffling, Diet members and other senior government officials took time out from their busy schedule to attend the inaugural meeting of newly formed "Federation of Diet members to promote the realisation of ILC" with a group with representatives from all political parties in Japan: Liberal Democratic party (LDP), Democratic party of Japan (DPJ), New Komeito (NK), Social Democratic Party (SDP), The People's New Party (PNP), and Japanese Communist Party (JCP). The federation's letter of intent describes its aim the promotion of the ILC project recognising that particle physics, as a research field with no ethnical, national or ideological borders, is the essential part of the nation's basic science research strategy.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Federation of Diet members, Japan
Barbara Warmbein | 31 July 2008In their meeting a couple of days ago at DESY, ECFA, the European Committee for Future Accelerators, got a complete update on all present and future particle physics activities in Europe. They also discussed the ILC and its potential: “We think it is important to remember that particle physics in Europe is more than the LHC,” says the current ECFA chair Karlheinz Meier from Heidelberg university in Germany. “The community has to plan now, gather facts and lay foundations for future projects, and the ILC is a very good example for this.”
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, ECFA
24 July 2008Unusually for the holiday season, the car parks are full, finding a table at lunch is a formidable challenge, and people can (more than ever) be found in their offices late into the night. All the evidence points to one thing… the most ambitious particle collider in the world is just a few weeks away from its first proton beam!
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CERN, LHC
Barbara Warmbein | 10 July 2008There may not have been a ribbon-cutting ceremony or speeches by heads of state. But the official kick-off of Cornell University's CESR storage ring as ILC damping ring test facility pleased the nearly 40 participants at this week's "Joint CesrTA Kickoff Meeting and ILC Damping Rings R&D Workshop (ILCDR08)" enormously. “CesrTA will give us a detailed picture of the how electron cloud builds up under a range of conditions, of how an ultra-low emittance positron beam interacts with the electron cloud, and of how beam instabilities driven by the electron cloud develop,” says Andy Wolski, damping ring group leader based at the Cockcroft Institute in the UK. “In this respect CesrTA plays a critical role in validating the decision to reduce costs by eliminating the second positron damping ring.”
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CESR, CesrTA, Cornell University, damping ring
3 July 2008The PosiPol2008 workshop was held from 16 to 18 June in Hiroshima, Japan. An unfamiliar word, "PosiPol" stands for "polarised positrons", meaning that the "spins" of positrons are aligned when they meet electrons at the centre of a linear collider. The electron beam is designed to be polarised at the ILC, but according to the baseline configuration positrons are unpolarised (or left naturally polarised) because making polarised positron is a difficult task to do.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, polarised positron beam, PosiPol, positron source
26 June 2008On May 31 we had a meeting of our ILC physics subgroup, which is a mixture of experimentalists and theorists working in Japan. The meeting was the fifth in a series that started about a year ago, and each time 20 to 30 people got together to monitor and discuss the direction of the subgroup’s activities. The primary task of the subgroup is to reexamine the ILC physics in the context of the expected LHC results and to further strengthen the physics case for the ILC project.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: ILC physics, Japan
19 June 2008When Fermilab reached out to neighbors five years ago to engage community members in laboratory decision making, some people in science and some neighbors doubted it would work.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: citizen task force, Fermilab, United States
Barbara Warmbein | 12 June 2008Particle physicists have the reputation that they need to smash things up in order to find out what they are about. Sometimes accelerator physicists get to smash stuff up, too: a group of engineers and technicians recently crash-tested a full cryomodule. They wanted to find out what the 12-metre piece of kit would look like if somebody happened to use the beam pipe as a stepladder, drive a tunnel vehicle into a flange or decide to rip out a vacuum pump.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cryomodule, DESY, FLASH, vacuum crash test, XFEL
