Rika Takahashi | 19 June 2008On June 11, the executive officers of leading Japanese companies, important dignitaries, and a physics Nobel Prize winner gathered at Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, Japan to celebrate the establishment of a forum for promotion of advanced accelerator technology and science (official English name yet to be determined). The forum aims to develop the structure which will be the core of the industry- government-academia alliance to pursue R&D for next- generation accelerators. The organising committee was formed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industrial Ltd. (MHI), Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric Co., and KEK. Companies from across various industries, laboratories and universities
Category: Feature | Tagged: AAA, Accelerator Association Promoting Science and Technology, Japan
Rika Takahashi and Nobuko Kobayashi | 5 June 2008On the last day of May, ILC scientists and engineers enjoyed a barbecue, sushi and Ton-jiru miso soup with pork and vegetables in front of the ATF (Accelerator Test Facility at KEK) container. This gathering, called the ATF end-of-run party, has been a routine event for over ten years.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ATF, KEK
Barbara Warmbein | 29 May 2008Sometimes even pretty straightforward and remarkably logical ideas take several moves before they become a reality. Take the planned damping rings for the ILC, for example. In the ILC, compact bunches of electrons and positrons are made to collide at very high energy. In order to ensure a high rate of particle collisions, the bunches are cooled in damping rings prior to acceleration. In a cold bunch, the particles are all very close together and travelling in very nearly the same direction with very nearly the same velocity. (In a hot bunch, as in a hot pot of water, the particles are more dispersed and are all moving in different directions.)
Category: Feature | Tagged: CESR, CesrTA, Cornell University, electron cloud, United States
Barbara Warmbein | 22 May 2008Hamburg isn't exactly known for its good weather and hours of sunshine per year. So when the sun is out and nature is exploding with spring leaves and early summer blossoms, Hamburgers go to every length to spend those precious times outside. Spending a day in a conference room darkened for better presentations, hunched over microphones to listen to colleagues at the other end of the world doesn't normally rank high on the list of things to do in Hamburg when the weather is nice. Nevertheless one of the participants of last week's cost management meeting described their three days as "very enjoyable", meaning it. One has to work on the ILC to appreciate the spirit...
Category: Feature | Tagged: cost estimate, DESY
8 May 2008One of Fermilab's most distinct buildings now has a new resident. Last month, members of the CALICE collaboration moved their calorimeters into the newly renovated Meson Test Beam Facility. They will test the calorimeters with low- and high-energy particle beams during the next two years.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, Fermilab, Meson Test Beam Facility
1 May 2008The SiD detector concept community met last week at the STFC's Cosener's House in Abingdon, UK. This was the first meeting after SiD submitted its Expression of Interest (EoI) and also the first SiD Workshop outside of the Americas. Hosted jointly by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Oxford University, the workshop attracted around 65 participants, mainly from the US and Europe. The focus of the meeting was on the status of the Particle Flow Algorithms (PFA) and on optimising the SiD Detector. Norman McCubbin, the head of Particle Physics division at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, opened the workshop and welcomed the SiD community to Cosener's House. John Jaros (SLAC) then outlined the goals of the workshop in his opening talk.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Rutherford-Appleton, SiD, SiD workshop, United Kingdom
17 April 2008Being the new CERN/LHC Communicator for Germany but not having a degree in physics (I worked at the press office of the Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany, for the past ten years), the CERN Open Day was an excellent opportunity to learn more about particle physics and "the world's largest particle physics laboratory" that I wouldn't have wanted to miss. The crowds were massive, but with the help of a press badge I managed to see a good variety of events and places.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, CERN open day, LHC, LHC communication
Rika Takahashi | 10 April 2008India's Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT) is a leading institute for research and development in lasers, accelerators and their applications. In the Indian government's current five-year plan (April 2007-April 2012), building infrastructure and developing the technology of niobium superconducting radiofrequency (SCRF) cavities are the two major objectives for high-energy physics and accelerator-related projects. Following this plan, RRCAT wants to build its own electropolishing (EP) facility in India, and three scientists visited Japan to participate in the commissioning of the new EP system at KEK.
Category: Feature | Tagged: India, India-Japan collaboration, Japan, RRCAT, SRF technology
Barbara Warmbein | 3 April 2008The TILC08 meeting in Sendai saw the first gathering of the new Accelerator Advisory Panel (AAP). Other than the yet to be established Project Advisory Committee, which will be formed following a request from the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC) and will consist mainly of machine and detector experts from outside the ILC community, the AAP is an internal body, there to advise the Global Design Effort director and to give critical recommendations.
Category: Feature | Tagged: AAP, Accelerator Advisory Panel, Japan, Sendai, TILC08
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 13 March 2008Michel 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: IDAG
