Elizabeth Clements | 19 April 2007At last week's Silicon Detector (SiD) concept meeting, participants used several words starting with the letter F -- Flow, as in particle flow; Funding, as in the need for more resources and manpower to fund detector R&D project; and Freezing, as in the weather at Fermilab. Approximately 70 members of SiD met at Fermilab to share the latest R&D results and plan for the future, namely how to prepare a draft Concept Design Report by this time next year.
Category: Feature | Tagged: SiD
Elizabeth Clements | 12 April 2007With a brand new floor and freshly cleaned out space, Fermilab's New Muon Laboratory is about to become the new home to a sixty-metre-long accelerator that will serve as a test area for ILC R&D. Until recently, the New Muon Laboratory housed the 2000-ton Chicago cyclotron magnet for more than 24 years. The newly renovated area will now be used to test cryomodules for the ILC with an electron beam.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Fermilab, New Muon Laboratory
5 April 2007The Temple of Heaven, a masterpiece of architecture and landscape design in Beijing symbolises the relationship between earth and heaven - the human society and the universe - which stands at the heart of Chinese cosmology. It was the central image on the poster for the 9th ACFA ILC Physics & Detector Workshop and ILC GDE Meeting in February 2007 at IHEP in Beijing, where the ILC reference design and preliminary cost were officially announced. Although the walkway towards the ILC is as long as that in the Temple of Heaven, China is now taking steady steps and making more contributions to the realisation of the ILC. This interest manifests itself in the Chinese scientists' unanimous support for China's participation in the ILC, which has been demonstrated during the Fragrant Mountain Meeting, held at the end of 2006, the expanding collaboration with KEK and other labs worldwide, the ILC GDE Meeting held in Beijing this February, and the various R&D efforts in progress at IHEP and other institutes.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerator R&D, Beijing, BILC078, China, IHEP
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 5 April 2007Before accelerating electrons and positrons, cavities need to undergo a number of treatments, such as chemical and electropolishing, the last one being baking. The standard baking procedure heats the cavity at 120°C for two days with an ultra high vacuum (UHV) requirement. These very restrictive conditions are unfortunately not appropriate for the treatment of 16,000 cavities that the ILC requires.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cavity baking, DAPNIA, France, Saclay
Barbara Warmbein | 29 March 2007When scientists take their detector prototypes to a test beam they enter a parallel world. Many basic needs are put on hold - the need for sunlight, regular meals or eight hours of sleep, for example. What counts is the beam time: you have three days, weeks or months to test your equipment, and you have to make the best of it because you might not get another chance. A team from Japan and Korea have just reached the halfway point of their time in the DESY test beam, calibrating, checking and recording data with their electromagnetic calorimeter prototype.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, DESY, detector R&D, ECal, HCal
22 March 2007While it's said that opposites attract, particle physicists are taking no chances. In hopes of learning what the universe is made of, they're preparing to build a machine that will accelerate and smash together electrons and their opposites, positrons, 14,000 times every second. Like Jefferson Lab's Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), the proposed new machine, the International Linear Collider (ILC), is being designed to use superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavity technology.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cavity, CEBAF, JLab, SRF technology
Elizabeth Clements | 15 March 2007Recent results from Cornell University demonstrated that a new method of electropolishing superconducting cavities may hold promise for the International Linear Collider. For the past two years, Cornell scientists have been developing an electropolishing method that treats cavities vertically as opposed to the traditional horizontal orientation developed by KEK. Cornell recently applied this new vertical method to a nine-cell ILC cavity for the first time and achieved positive results. “This is the first step to show the viability of the new method,” says Cornell physicist Hasan Padamsee.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Cornell University, electropolishing, vertical electropolishing
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 15 March 2007Last January, engineers from the DAPNIA laboratory in Saclay France qualified a new electropolishing facility for single cell cavities. Their first electropolished cavity reaches a promising result, above 42 MV/m (megavolts per metre) of accelerating gradient. It allows them to join the global R&D effort on these cavity treatments.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerating gradient, cavity gradient, DAPNIA, France, Saclay
Elizabeth Clements | 8 March 2007As physicists and engineers devise ways to make the International Linear Collider perform better at a lower cost, the design evolves, sometimes with tweaks but at other times with major reconfigurations.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILC design
