Barry Barish | 19 December 2011On behalf of my colleagues worldwide who have been working so hard to develop a design for the International Linear Collider, we enthusiastically welcome the Japanese expression of interest in hosting the ILC. We report in today’s special issue of NewsLine on a special high-level meeting addressing this subject that was held in Japan last week. The Japanese are very strong partners in the technical effort to develop a design for the ILC through the Global Design Effort. The GDE represents a unique global process to develop and make technical decisions for the technical design of such a very large international project through a worldwide organisation developing the design and coordinating the R&D programmes. As we approach our goal of producing a detailed ILC technical design, it is particularly timely and encouraging for us to learn of the Japanese interest in hosting the facility and to follow the unfolding early status reports from the CERN LHC on the Higgs searches.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ILC hosting, Japan
Barry Barish | 8 December 2011The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) sponsors a meeting every three years on “Future Perspectives in High Energy Physics.” This year the ICFA seminar was held at CERN and it broadly covered plans and ideas for future facilities for our field. This meeting was particularly timely, as it coincided both with the completion of the impressive first year of running of the LHC and with the kickoff of the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics to be completed in 2013.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, future accelerators, ICFA, particle physics theory, plasma accelerators
Barry Barish | 1 December 2011In just over one year we plan to produce the final Global Design Effort deliverable, a Technical Design Report for the ILC. We have made a set of important improvements in the design over the past year that will result in an ILC design that is more optimised for cost, performance and risk, and have recently hammered out a large number of smaller technical decisions at the Baseline Technical Review at DESY.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: baseline design, baseline technical review, btr, ILC baseline, TDR
Nick Walker | 23 November 2011ILC Project Manager Nick Walker describes the several books that will form up the ILC Technical Design Report. This ambitious document, planned to be released by Spring 2013, should reflect the enormous job led by the Global Design Effort over the last years.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ILC R&D, TDR, Technical Design Report
Barry Barish | 17 November 2011The Funding Agencies for Large Colliders (FALC), an informal group of agency representatives met at CERN on 6 October. FALC is constituted to improve the possibilities for international cooperation in high-energy physics by understanding the planning processes in the funding agencies, exchanging information on plans and statuses of projects in different countries or regions and preparing for cooperation on future particle physics facilities. Highlights of this FALC meeting included discussion of plans for the ILC and more generally for lepton colliders following completion of the ILC Technical Design Report, as well as discussions of plans for the European Strategy Update just getting underway.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CERN Council, CLIC, European Strategy for Particle Physics, FALC, ILCSC
Barry Barish | 10 November 2011An experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, designed to study the oscillation properties of neutrinos in travelling 732 kilometres from CERN to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, reported evidence that these neutrinos arrive sooner than expected for particles travelling at the speed of light. Although the reported deviation is quite small, if correct, it would violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. The physics community now has to check whether the evidence is correct.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: MINOS, neutrinos, OPERA, scientific method, speed of light
Barry Barish | 3 November 2011The first joint ILC/CLIC workshop was held last year in Geneva. It was an important step towards bringing these two R&D and design efforts closer together. This year we held a second joint workshop in Granada, Spain, and the muon collider effort also participated. One of the primary aims of the CLIC and ILC collaborations is to work more collaboratively on joint problems, and another is to join together behind a single project by the time we propose to build a linear collider. Last week in this column Mike Harrison gave his observations of the Granada meeting that he characterised as ‘from the back of the room’, and today I add mine ‘from the front row.’
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: future, LCWS11
Mike Harrison | 27 October 2011Superconducting radiofrequency technology is advancing, the ILC design is coming together, and the LHC programme is running exceptionally well, although the evidence for new physics remains tantalizing. The linear collider community is well on its way to bringing the next big particle collider to the world's stage.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: LCWS11, LHC, Superconducting RF
