Steinar Stapnes | 16 May 2013[caption id="attachment_26861" align="alignleft" width="300"] Steinar Stapnes (at that time leading the European Strategy process) announced the launch of the process to update the European strategy for particle physics during an ECFA-EPS special session in Grenoble, France, on 23 July, 2011.Image: LPSC/Tomas Jezo[/caption] The European Strategy for Particle Physics has been submitted to the CERN Council. The goal is final approval in the coming weeks. The significance of the Strategy document is high. It has been drafted by a combination of a scientific preparation group and various appointed representatives of the CERN member states, including also representatives from other countries and/or regions. One important feature of the European process is that from draft to final approval in the Council takes only months, and the Council members/decision represent the governments directly. Secondly – as “global projects” have large cross-regional consequences and this process pre-dates other on-going processes in the US, Japan and other places – it has wide impact also beyond Europe, as a minimum serving as a possible example. The LHC including its luminosity upgrade is a clear and rather obvious priority for the future, but the physics potential of future Linear Colliders is also well recognised in the Strategy statements. The relevant phrases were already quoted by Lyn Evans in his Director Corner in March: For CLIC and higher energy hadron machine than LHC as options for post-LHC projects at CERN, “CERN should undertake design studies for accelerator projects in a global context, with emphasis on proton-proton and electron-positron high-energy frontier machines. These design studies should be coupled to a vigorous accelerator R&D programme, including high-field magnets and high-gradient accelerating structures, in collaboration with national institutes, laboratories and universities worldwide.” For the ILC, “There is a strong scientific case for an electron-positron collider, complementary to the LHC, that can study the properties of the Higgs boson and other particles with unprecedented precision and whose energy can be upgraded. The Technical Design Report of the International Linear Collider (ILC) has been completed with large European participation. The initiative of the Japanese particle physics community to host the ILC in Japan is most welcome, and European groups are eager to participate. Europe looks forward to a proposal from Japan to discuss a possible participation”. Other statements mention the importance of accelerator R&D, detector R&D and discuss CERNs role in the implementation of projects outside the CERN laboratory as well as its continued work with the European Commission (EC) to implement these strategies. Also these statements are relevant for the LC community. What can and should we expect to happen in practice as a result? There are at least three main areas that are affected by this strategy: the CERN budget planning itself, the European Commission (EC) support for projects and activities, and various national funding programmes. The CERN budget planning for 2014 and beyond is underway and it will be important to see these statements reflected in realities. Some key recommendations, in particular turning the LHC luminosity upgrade into a real-construction project over the next decade require significant resources, so the balance is non-trivial and delicate. Equally important, over the coming years, Horizon 2020 projects representing the EC implementation tools will unfold and the R&D efforts mentioned are expected to become priorities – discussed as part the implementation of the European Strategy for Particle Physics as stipulated in the Memorandum of Understanding between the European Commission and CERN. Finally the national priorities determine in many cases how the community can participate in the these projects and we all need to work hard to turn there priorities into realities also at this level. For the ILC there is an additional clear wish; a proposal from Japan to participate in such a project is seen as the next natural step to achieve a change of gear towards realisation. Being optimistic, we can hope that other regional and national processes will not diverge in a significant way from the result of the European process. If this is the case, we will have reached – largely thanks to a bottom up process - an important consensus that should help the transition from strategies to realities in the coming years. New LHC results in 2015-16 might and will hopefully provide additional guidance but for the time being the directions are relatively clear. We will also be very much helped if the linear collider community can plan and use resources across CLIC and ILC as efficiently as possible, to make the best possible use of our resources. In all areas related to luminosity performance of the machines, detector and physics studies, project planning and implementation studies, there are huge potentials for common efforts. Another feature of the real world and realities is that resources will remain a limitation and determine the speed of our progress.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CERN, CLIC, European Strategy for Particle Physics, ILC
Barbara Warmbein | 7 March 2013[caption id="attachment_26218" align="alignleft" width="300"] Image by Marcello Pavan, TRIUMF[/caption] According to Linear Collider Deputy Director Hitoshi Murayama, the Large Hadron Collider is a collider of cherry pies, with lots of cherries, pastry and cream flying off in all directions, while what scientists are really after is the collision of two cherry seeds. The ILC and CLIC, by contrast, are colliders of cherry seeds, he explained at a press conference at TRIUMF laboratory in Vancouver to mark the beginning of the Linear Collider Collaboration. "Throwing two cherry seeds at each other is difficult, but you can see clearly what's going on - and for the ILC that is similar to what happened in the early Universe," he said when asked about the fundamental differences between LHC and the linear collider. Detector Director Hitoshi Yamamoto added that once the LHC discovered the Higgs, "at the ILC we can do in a day” with the Higgs what it would take the LHC several years to accomplish. Linear Collider Board chair Sachio Komamiya estimated that some 80 to 90 percent of collisions at the ILC would feature the Higgs, making it easy to fund and study in detail. Barry Barish made the new value estimate for the ILC public at the conference. Watch the video of the press conference - in both English and Japanese - here.
Category: Image of the week | Tagged: ILC, LHC, Linear Collider Collaboration, press conference
Barry Barish and Lyn Evans | 21 February 2013Today represents a crossroads in the global efforts towards a linear collider. We are officially making the transition from the International Linear Collider Steering Committee and Global Design Efforts to the new Linear Collider Board and Linear Collider Collaboration that will coordinate the next phase of the global R&D towards a high-energy electron-positron collider to complement the LHC. GDE Director Barry Barish and LCC Director Lyn Evans share their vision in a joint Director’s Corner.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, GDE, ILC, Linear Collider Collaboration, Technical Design Report
21 February 2013Vancouver, 21 February 2013. The two most mature future particle physics projects, the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Compact Linear Collider study (CLIC), have formed an official organisational partnership today. As the newly founded Linear Collider Collaboration, they will coordinate and advance the global development work for the linear collider, a global project to complement the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and ultimately understand the deepest secrets of the universe.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CLIC, directorate, ICFA, ILC, Linear Collider Board, Linear Collider Collaboration
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
11 October 2012The third issue of Accelerating News, a quarterly online publication for the accelerator community in Europe and beyond, looks towards the future: after the LHC as the world's first Higgs production place, what could a real factory look like? What's the plan for neutrinos? Written by the experts, the newsletter gives a broad overview.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: accelerator R&D, CLIC, EuCARD, European Strategy for Particle Physics, Higgs factory, ILC
Image: DESY | 4 October 2012Linear collider detector experts get it straight - a vision of the XFEL tunnel that is. CLIC detector engineers from CERN visited DESY last week to discuss detector challenges such as earthquake stability, alignment, assembly planning and the construction of the detector's magnet yoke with their colleagues from the ILC's ILD detector. They also visited the tunnel for the European XFEL that is currently being constructed.
Category: Image of the week | Tagged: CLIC, detector R&D, European XFEL, ILC, tunnel
