Newsline

Director's Corner

Decisions, decisions, decisions

by Barry Barish

In just over one year we plan to produce the final Global Design Effort deliverable, a Technical Design Report for the ILC. We have made a set of important improvements in the design over the past year that will result in an ILC design that is more optimised for cost, performance and risk, and have recently hammered out a large number of smaller technical decisions at the Baseline Technical Review at DESY.

Around the World

From iSGTW: New accelerators, now just a CLIC away

The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) team at CERN are investigating the potential of a new kind of particle accelerator, and to help them they are simulating their designs using grid resources, such the UK computing grid for particle physics, GridPP. They build a customised version of the DIRAC system, called ILCDirac, a grid environment for both CLIC and similar experiments which is aimed at benefitting the entire linear collider community.

Read the full article in International Science Grid This Week
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on the GridPP website

Feature

Successful slamming with music and the ILC

Germany celebrates “Weltmaschine” LHC

by Barbara Warmbein

In a nationwide “Weltmaschine day” to celebrate the second anniversary of collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, universities and institutes all over Germany not only presented the latest results from the LHC to crowded lecture halls, but also showed the fun side of physics in slams and exhibits. A slam about the ILC came first at DESY in Hamburg.

Image of the week

“Hey Granny, what is superconductivity?”

Image: Lison Bernet

Granny superconductivity turns 100 this year! Learn more about “her” in the French LHC comics (BD du LHC) with Episode 1: story of a discovery and Episode 2: Gloriaaaa Conductivitaeeee, the quantum wave.

In the News

  • from DESY
    28 November 2011
    DESY engages in Belle II
    On 18 November, the laying of the foundation stone for the SuperKEKB accelerator took place at the Japanese accelerator laboratory KEK in Tsukuba. This accelerator with the corresponding particle detector Belle II will become a so-called Super-B-factory.
  • from The New York Times
    28 November 2011
    How Do Eminent Physicists Tackle Higgs Boson? With Chocolate
    …since Dr. Wilczek had a compelling theoretical argument on his side, he was happy to give her odds of 10 to 1. If the L.H.C. finds the Higgs boson with a mass below 150 GeV, he wins 10 Nobel chocolate coins (the pinnacle of Hanukkah gelt); if not, Dr. Conrad wins 100.
  • from Reuters
    24 November 2011
    Search narrowed for Higgs: does it exist?
    The 21-nation CERN’s ruling Council meets from December 12 to December 16 and any concrete sign of the Higgs – whose existence was postulated four decades ago by British scientist Peter Higgs – would be reported during that session.
  • from ScienceNOW
    22 November 2011
    Cosmic Antimatter Excess Confirmed
    When the PAMELA team saw a spike in the ratio of positrons to the more abundant electrons over a particular slice of the energy spectrum, some physicists got excited.