Newsline

ILC NewsLine special issue

Detecting all the challenges

Why will the International Linear Collider have two detectors? What's the story behind this decision, and what are the challenges that the ILC planners and detector developers face? Today's issue concentrates on the big questions that (literally) surround the big future particle cameras.

Feature

If the particles won’t come to the detector…

Experts on detector, machine-detector interface and civil engineering agree on detector hall design

by Barbara Warmbein

Five shafts, pacmen shields and moving platforms: the design for the hall in which the ILC detectors will sit, be pushed and pulled, record data, get upgrades and maintenance is now final, at least for an ILC that is not built underneath mountains.

Director's Corner

The two detector concepts for the ILC

by Barry Barish

The ILC physics programme is based on building two complementary detectors that will share beam time. The value of having two detectors with different designs, technologies, collaborations and emphasis has proven to be a very effective way to exploit the science. For the ILC, we propose using a push-pull concept to cost-effectively share the beam between two detectors.

Video of the week

The Higgs Boson – A Tales from the Road Comic

Video: PhD Comics, images: Jorge Cham

An illustrated and animated interview about the mysterious Higgs boson and “how the LHC is going to find it (if it exists)”.

In the News

  • from phys.org
    9 May 2012
    It’s Official: Physics is Hard

    … Toby Cubitt and his colleagues, Jens Eisert and Michael Wolf, of the Universities of Berlin and Munich respectively, show in this article the difficulty of obtaining the equations that govern the temporal evolution of a physical system, from observations of the system at different times, thereby showing the mathematical certainty of the difficulty of physics. …

  • from Crain’s Chicago Business
    4 May 2012
    Fermilab to shed about 80 positions

    … In February, the White House released a budget proposal that zeroed out money for research on Fermilab’s International Linear Collider and cut funding in half for development of the lab’s Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment. …

  • from Daily Herald
    4 May 2012
    Fermilab job cuts to take effect Oct. 1, Oddone says

    Up to 80 positions will be cut at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, officials announced Friday.

    The workforce reductions come amid anticipated federal spending cuts to the lab.