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Director's Corner

A front row seat at the Granada linear collider workshop

by Barry Barish

The 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.’

Around the World

Hungry for science

Open Day at DESY draws crowds of curious visitors

by Barbara Warmbein

Last Saturday’s Open Day and Science Night at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, attracted more than 13 000 visitors. The lab presented its many fields of research, including the ILC, in a tent outside the entrance to the HERA accelerator tunnel. ILC detector developers and accelerator experts explained what the project is all about.

Around the World

The multiplying effects of an accelerator economy

Niowave in Lansing, US is bringing superconducting cavities to the larger science community

by Leah Hesla

A company in Lansing, US is developing accelerator cavities for the ILC. In the course of improving these high-tech devices, it has enhanced its expertise in developing them for other areas of science and, as an added benefit, sustaining the technology R&D.

Slideshow

Tevatron tribute

Images: Cindy Arnold, Miles Boone, Reidar Hahn, Marty Murphy

On 30 September, LCWS11 was winding down in Granada, Spain. On the other side of the world, the Tevatron shut down after 28 years of operation. Fermilab celebrated the life of the collider with a lab-wide ceremony and party.

In the News

  • from New Scientist
    1 November 2011
    As researchers start analysing the new data, the LHC is switching to colliding lead ions for four weeks, starting on 5 November. These collisions produce pockets of very dense and hot matter, recreating the conditions in the first moments after the big bang.
  • from symmetry breaking
    1 November 2011
    Stanford University announced today that Persis S. Drell, director at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has decided to return to her position as a faculty member.
  • from Nature
    28 October 2011
    This year’s hunt for the Higgs boson is drawing to a close. On 30 October, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, will end its 2011 run of the proton–proton collisions that search for the elusive particle, thought to give other fundamental particles their mass.
  • from Time
    26 October 2011
    Like Hollywood legends Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn, dark energy and dark matter are completely unrelated, even though they share a name.