Barbara Warmbein | 30 September 2010
A woman kneels, almost devoutly, in front of a piece of beam pipe. One man is lying flat on his belly, squinting along the underside of a long step illuminated by blue warning lights. Another sits cross-legged opposite a barrel wheel of a particle detector and studies its forms. A new meditation class for particle physicists? No - just the world’s first global particle physics photo walk.
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Feature | Tagged:
photography, photowalk
Barbara Warmbein | 9 September 2010
In a hall for test beam experiments at CERN, next to the CLOUD climate experiment and an irradiation facility, sits a detector prototype that is in many ways a first. It's the first ever hadronic sandwich calorimeter (HCal) prototype made of tungsten. It's the first prototype for a detector for the Compact Linear Collider Study CLIC, developed by the linear collider detector R&D group (LCD group) at CERN. And it's the first piece of hardware that results directly from the cooperation between CLIC and ILC detector study groups. Now its makers are keen to see first particle showers in their detector.
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Feature | Tagged:
CALICE, CERN, CLIC, detector R&D, hadronic calorimeter, HCal, tungsten calorimeter
Barbara Warmbein | 19 August 2010
This week marks the beginning of a small series in ILC NewsLine on future projects in particle physics beyond the linear collider. Today's Director's Corner summarises the talks on future projects from the recent International conference on High Energy Physics. This article gives a small inventory of ideas that are being discussed. Selected projects will then be presented in more detail in future issues, to highlight new accelerator concepts, technology and challenges for the possible future projects. They fall into several different categories. Most immediate are projects that in some way build on or complement the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Another category are projects that deal with neutrino or flavour physics. And there are ion colliders and projects that look at new ways of acceleration to make accelerators shorter and thus less costly. None of them have officially been accepted, and like all plans for the future these concepts are evolving. They may never be built, or be built in different ways described here
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future accelerators
Barbara Warmbein | 15 July 2010
Some ideas are so good that you have to export them when you move from one country to the other. This is especially the case in a global project like the ILC, where three regions and people from all over the place work together to make sure that whatever the LHC will find, the next generation of particle accelerators can study in detail. So when theorist Gudrid Moortgat-Pick moved from Durham, UK, to Hamburg, Germany, she took the concept of the interdisciplinary linear collider forum with her to create it in Germany. The first meeting of the new working group took place at DESY in June.
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Around the World | Tagged:
DESY, German Helmholtz Alliance, German linear collider forum, Germany
Barbara Warmbein | 1 July 2010
Textbooks were being rewritten during last week’s Physics at LHC conference. “I was sitting in the session, listening to the ALICE talk by Andrea Dainese from Padova on Wednesday morning, and suddenly I knew: I could replace all the textbook bubble-chamber pictures from the sixties in my lectures,” said DESY’s Thomas Naumann, a member of the ATLAS collaboration.
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Around the World | Tagged:
booklet, LHC, particle data booklet, PDG
Barbara Warmbein | 10 June 2010
I don't usually start stories for ILC NewsLine with the word 'I'. This time I have to make an exception, because for a change I was not merely a spectator and communicator of science, but a facilitator (of sorts). One of the actors in something both very mundane and very exciting: transporting scientific equipment from one lab to another. On Sunday 30 May, the EUDET beam telescope was brought from DESY to CERN, and I was one of its (three) drivers.
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Around the World | Tagged:
DESY, EUDET, EUDET telescope
Barbara Warmbein | 13 May 2010
The Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors at Accelerators (AIDA) proposal has received top grades from the European Commission, meaning that the multi-disciplinary multi-institutional detector development project will definitely go ahead. Out of 47 submitted proposals, AIDA came second with a score of 14.5 out of 15. The only catch is that the EC cut the proposed funding from 10 to 8 million Euros, reducing the full funding to just under 28 million Euros over four years. The project partners are now in the process of redefining the scope of the project in order to match the new budget, but are planning to keep as much as possible to the originally foreseen work. The coordinators and the EC are currently in a negotiation phase and the starting date of AIDA is expected for early 2011.
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Feature | Tagged:
AIDA, detector R&D, Europe
Barbara Warmbein | 8 April 2010
On days when the LHC makes front page news, some web pages get more attention than they usually do. A page that is highly frequented by LHC operators, on display in all control rooms and a favourite link for physicists, but otherwise not all that well known, is LHC Page 1 (aka OP Vistars). One quick look gives you all the important information on the status of the machine. ILC NewsLine wanted to find out: what would an ILC Page 1 look like?
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Around the World | Tagged:
LHC
Barbara Warmbein | 25 March 2010
In a venue that many ILC people know very well from last year's TILC meeting, the Epochal Conference Center in Tsukuba, Japan, another meeting is underway that may well change the course of physics research for scientists from Europe and Asia. The Asia Europe Physics Summit ASEPS covers all areas of physics research, from nanotechnology and energy to medical research and accelerator development. It goes even further than that: it looks at the history of collaboration between Asia and Europe and combines lessons learnt from the past with plans for future projects like the ILC. Follow it live via videoconference; instructions are given below.
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ASEPS, Asia, Europe
Barbara Warmbein | 11 March 2010
A team from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich just found scientific evidence for the old saying that less is more. By shaving off a piece of scintillating tile, they achieved test results that were considerably better than tests with a tile that was complete. The trick: stick a silicon photomultiplier into the shaved-off groove, rather than just on the outside of the tile. “After quite a few iterations, we came up with a shape for the plastic tile that works extremely well. It also now includes a SiPM that is embedded into the tile, which is important for a realistic calorimeter since then the individual cells can be placed edge on edge, without any gaps between them,” explains the team leader Frank Simon. Frank Simon is also an active blogger on Quantum Diaries, and one of his most recent entries features an explanation of tiles, fibres and photomultipliers and how they came up with the idea of reshaping the tile.
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Feature | Tagged:
CALICE, scintillator, SiPM
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