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From SLAC today: SLAC’s historic ‘End Station A’ hosts electron beams again

Electrons are once again streaming into SLAC's historic End Station A, setting the stage for a new user facility in the huge, concrete hall where the first evidence for quarks was discovered. Fed by billion-particle bunches of high-energy electrons diverted from the linear accelerator supply to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the new beamline, called the End Station Test Beam (ESTB), will initially host three types of experiments: General beam physics and machine-detector interface studies for the proposed International Linear Collider and Compact Linear Collider, radiation hardness tests on detector components and R&D for high-energy physics detectors, which will use secondary particles created when the main beam hits a target.

Director's Corner

Demonstrating the ILC final focus parameters

by Barry Barish

A key feature of the ILC is that it is a single-pass machine. In contrast to a circular accelerator, where the beam goes around many times, the ILC beams pass through each accelerator element only once, including the interaction point. For the accelerator, this means that for each accelerating module, the machine must be very efficient at transferring wall power into the machine beam, with the added requirement that the final beam must emerge with very low emittance so that it can be focused to the very tiny beam spot required to achieve high luminosity. The ATF-2 at KEK is a special test beam line that has been built to demonstrate the ability to achieve ILC-like namometre beam spots and stabilise them. Recent tests have demonstrated beam spots that are within a factor of two of the ILC design and promise to improve in the future.

Image of the week

US and Japan discuss cooperation in advanced science and technology

It's suit and tie time when high-level US and Japanese science planners meet. At the US-Japan Advanced Science and Technology Symposium, held on 30 April in Washington DC, leaders from government, academia and industry met to discuss US-Japan cooperation in science and technology, using the ILC as an example. Learn more in the next issue of LC NewsLine. On the left is a Daniel B. Poneman, Deputy Secretary of Energy, and on the right Takeo Kawamura, Member of the Lower House and Chair of the Federation of Diet members in support of the ILC.

In the News

  • from The Shorthorn
    1 May 2013
    Higgs particle research stops for improvement

    “Now, we need to go to the full capacity of the accelerator,” Yu said. “Also, linear collider and advanced detectors are being developed for future precision measurements of Higgs and other new particles.”

  • from CERN
    30 April 2013
    CERN celebrates 20 years of a free, open web

    Twenty years ago CERN1 published a statement that made the World Wide Web (“W3″, or simply “the web”) technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.

  • from Asia Policy Point
    29 April 2013
    Japan speaks in Washington

    In Japan, this is Golden Week. For Washington this means that there will an influx of official visitors from Japan.

  • from Reuters UK
    24 April 2013
    UK firm buys cancer-zapping spin-off from CERN collider

    The giant particle-smashing machine run by CERN outside Geneva is not only unravelling the mysteries of the universe, it may also be opening up new avenues to treat cancer.