This year’s Nobel Prize was awarded to our colleague, Barry Barish, a former, prominent leader of the linear collider community for many years. Associate Director for Physics and Detectors Jim Brau reports on Barry Barish’s role in the first direct detection of gravitational waves and managing large science projects.

Sometimes a neat line of dots on a computer screen can stand for that moment when it all comes together. A reward for years of hard work, many meetings, lots of travel and nights spent in test beam huts. At least that’s the case for a team of physicists and engineers who have spent the last years designing and testing detector components for a future linear-collider detector, the Silicon-Tungsten electromagnetic calorimeter or SiW-ECAL. During a recent test campaign at the German research lab DESY the developers came together to probe their latest detector design together with the latest sensors and all components that have been developed over the last years.