Barry Barish | 20 December 2012One of the key objectives of the ILC R&D programme during the Technical Design Phase has been to characterise electron cloud effects in an ILC-like low-emittance positron damping ring and to test proposed mitigation techniques. The centerpiece of our efforts has been the CesrTA programme that involved reconfiguring it as an ILC-like low emittance ring and instrumenting it to carry out these studies. CesrTA has been a highly successful experimental programme, leading to reliable mitigation strategies for the ILC positron damping rings.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CesrTA, Cornell University, damping ring, electron cloud
Steinar Stapnes | 6 December 2012It is reporting season: the ILC community is producing the Technical Design Report that also includes the Detector Baseline Design reports, and the CLIC collaboration with associated Detector and Physics studies group have been hard at work completing the CLIC Conceptual Design Report (CDR). The documentation probably surpasses by a large amount - in scope, details and volume - what is normally called a CDR for a project, but then again, there is a lot of work to report on.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: accelerator R&D, CLIC, Conceptual Design Report, detector R&D
Barry Barish | 21 November 2012One of the most important goals of the Global Design Effort has been to demonstrate that high-gradient cavities can be reliably produced in industry. We established two gradient goals: to produce cavities qualified at 35 Megavolts per metre (MV/m) in vertical tests and to demonstrate that an average gradient of 31.5 MV/m is achievable for ILC cryomodules. Furthermore, we set a goal of producing these high-gradient cavities in industry with 50% yield by 2010 and 90% yield by the end of 2012. We have recently achieved these ambitious goals!
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: accelerator R&D, cavity gradient, superconducting cavity, TDR
Barry Barish | 8 November 2012The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) held a “Special Linear Collider Event” as part of their 2012 Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference at Anaheim, California. The special event, held on 29 and 30 October, came on the heels of the discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the LHC at CERN this summer and included an array of leaders in the field. There were presentations on the International Linear Collider (ILC) and Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) accelerators as well as detector concepts, the potential impact of the LC technologies for industrial applications and a forum discussion about future LC perspectives.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, IEEE, ILC, industry, Linear Collider
Barry Barish | 1 November 2012For several years, 2012 has been anticipated as the time when progress in the field of high energy physics would enable us to clarify the priorities for future planning. The interesting LCWS12 workshop at the University of Texas brought together the elements for such planning, if not a plan. There were reports on the discovery of the Higgs-like particle at the LHC and how that might be pursued in a linear collider; there were reports on the future planning processes that are underway in Europe, Japan and the U.S. and there were reports on the progress in developing the ILC Technical Design and CLIC Conceptual Design as well as how a staged approach might be responsive to the LHC discovery.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, ILC, LCWS12, organisation, Technical Design Report
Toshiaki Tauchi | 25 October 2012KEK's Accelerator Test facility (ATF) is up again after its summer shutdown. After several improvements to beams size monitors, multi-ole magnets and the organisation structure, the international team is looking forward to squeezing the beam size further and further towards the 37 nanometres required for the ILC.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ATF2, beam monitor, beam size, magnet
Barry Barish | 18 October 2012The S1-Global experiment was conceived to demonstrate the radiofrequency (RF) operation of an ILC cryomodule with an average accelerating gradient of 31.5 MV/metre. The project to build a segment of a superconducting linac system and test the string of superconducting RF cavities was carried out at KEK through a global collaboration. This experiment provided a significant and successful demonstration of the operation of eight nine-cell superconducting cavities and associated hardware components with components provided from laboratories around the world.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: international collaboration, plug compatibility, S1-global
Barry Barish | 11 October 2012The Technical Design Report will be the culmination and final deliverable for the ILC Global Design Effort. The report will be submitted in near final form to the ILC Program Advisory Committee in November for technical review in December at KEK. The drafting of the report has been under way since last spring. The GDE Executive Committee recently performed a critical review of a second snapshot of the evolving TDR draft.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: executive committee, LCWS, LCWS12, PAC, Technical Design Report
Barry Barish | 4 October 2012The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel met on 27 and 28 August in Rockville, Maryland, US. A central focus of this meeting was the proposed Fermilab Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment. The meeting included presentations on the physics potential, the reconfiguration options in response to Department of Energy guidance, and perspectives from Fermilab, the collaboration and the DOE.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: future, HEPAP, long-baseline, neutrinos, United States
Nick Walker | 27 September 2012GDE Project Manager Nick Walker reports from a focused, positive and lively meeting in Cracow and the impact the discussions can have on the ILC. Would a staged approach - starting at 250 GeV to make the ILC a Higgs factory and ramping up to 500 GeV later - make for a cheaper machine? Where are the potential savings, and how long would it take to build an ILC Higgs factory?
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cost, European Strategy for Particle Physics, Higgs factory, Technical Design Report
