Barbara Warmbein | 12 February 2009
The small town of Schenefeld just outside Hamburg in northern Germany isn't exactly known for its sights or its tourism. Many Schenefeld citizens, however, have recently become tourists in their own neighbourhood: ever since the construction works for the European XFEL started on 8 January, the building site sees a steady flow of visitors stopping by on or from their way to the shops, checking on progress, curious about their new neighbour. While the whole ILC project can learn a lot from this curiosity (namely establishing good contact with neighbours when construction for the collider starts), one specific group is digging deeper: the 'conventional facilities and siting (CF&S)' team is establishing close contacts to experts working on the European XFEL to learn from them and to help when possible.
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CFS, conventional facilities, conventional facilities and siting, XFEL
Barbara Warmbein | 8 January 2009
The majority of NewsLine readers are scientists – most of you of the experimental kind. So be honest: how often during the last few weeks, when listening to carols, plucking the strings of your old guitar that you only get out during the holidays or cringing at a dissonant brass band, did you think about the physics and the maths of music? Go to the ILCT-MDB Horizontal Test Stand at Fermilab now and you can experience a perfect third harmonic: that of a string of cavities being tested and assembled into a cryomodule.
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Around the World | Tagged:
cryomodule, cryomodule string, Fermilab, horizontal test stand, United States
Barbara Warmbein | 11 December 2008
When you have a set of new hardware and a clear mission ahead of you, the first step to complete the mission is to commission the hardware. After reconfiguring their storage ring and light source CESR, Cornell University and the international ILC team working on damping ring studies switched on the machine in early October and performed the first electron cloud studies in the low emittance configuration in November. “It was an intense week and we have some very interesting new data,” says Mark Palmer, CesrTA project manager.
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CesrTA, Cornell University, damping ring, electron cloud
Barbara Warmbein | 13 November 2008
The time projection chamber is part of the tracker system of a future ILD detector at the ILC and will one day reproduce highly precise tracks of the particles that passed through its gas. A plot of all the tracks leading to a workshop called ‘the tent’ on the DESY campus would make for an interesting event display: in the course of the last weeks many parts for the detector prototype arrived from destinations around the world, together with their experts. While field cage, cathode and module dummies came from Germany, the anode endplate travelled all the way from Cornell University in the States. France brought a Micromegas readout module, Belgium contributed the trigger logic and the Netherlands the beam trigger equipment for the coming test with cosmic rays or test beam.
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Around the World | Tagged:
DESY, detector R&D, ILD, time projection chamber, TPC
Barbara Warmbein | 6 November 2008
More than 1034 times per second per square centimetre — that’s how often electrons and positrons are supposed to collide in the ILC. The project’s accelerator experts have no doubts that it can be done, but they have to demonstrate it, too. An important proof is to run ILC-like beam conditions through a radiofrequency (RF) unit that consists of one klystron and 26 superconducting cavities housed in three cryomodules. Running ILC-like beam conditions means running the cavities at their gradient limits and with 800-microsecond beam pulses with an average current of about nine milliamperes (or mA). The FLASH accelerator at DESY is capable of approaching these ILC-like beam conditions, but they are at the design limits of the machine and are well beyond typical operating conditions. An international team with members from DESY, FNAL, SLAC, KEK, and Argonne have come together for a series of tests that wants to drive an ILC-like beam through FLASH.
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Around the World | Tagged:
DESY, FLASH
Barbara Warmbein | 2 October 2008
The scientists working on the International Large Detector concept ILD had met for the second time this year to discuss the set-up of their future masterpiece. The ILD group formed about a year ago from the former GLD and LDC detector concept groups. Both concepts had their plans for trackers, calorimeters and the detector set-up as a whole.
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ILD
Barbara Warmbein | 11 September 2008
Wednesday must have been one of the biggest days in science history. It certainly was the biggest day in particle physics for a long time coming - the first full beam around the LHC. The first protons completed the full circle at 10:28 am (less than an hour after first injection), and scientists in CERN's control rooms cheered and clapped, ran to the screens, pointed at monitors and breathed a massive, communal sigh of relief. Amazingly, after a cryogenic glitch around lunchtime, another first beam made its first full lap in the opposite direction at 15:03. The media centre in CERN's Globe was abuzz, French media had gathered in a Paris bar to follow the events, German press was connected via a multi-way videoconference and at Fermilab scientists and press watched in dressing gown and pyjamas. It was a picture-book start-up.
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CERN, LHC
Barbara Warmbein | 4 September 2008
There are many official stages to a project financed by the European Commission – from call, proposal, negotiations, contract draft, start of work, annual reports to one of the most official events: the kick-off meeting. Europe's new flagship project on cavity production and exploration of international governance structures, ILC-HiGrade took this step last week. Representatives form all eight work packages were at DESY to present their objectives, their to-do lists and the milestones already achieved.
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Around the World | Tagged:
DESY, Europe, ILC HiGrade
Barbara Warmbein | 28 August 2008
The international time projection chamber (TPC) team that works on R&D for future ILC detectors used to have a bit of a running gag. Somebody would proclaim that “the field cage will arrive next week” and everybody else would chuckle because week after week it didn’t arrive. Chuckling days are over now: after several years of planning the cage for the large TPC prototype, ordering it from industry, checking the quality, rejecting parts of the product and reordering, the nearly one-metre-long barrel with an inner diameter of 72 centimetres has finally arrived at DESY in Hamburg. First tests indicate that it will finally meet the team's high requirements.
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DESY, detector R&D, time projection chamber, TPC
Barbara Warmbein | 21 August 2008
Which is the right word to complete this series: KEK, Snowmass, Hamburg, ... ? Chicago of course! After the first three venues, the fourth General ILC Workshop (ILC08) will take place in Chicago this year, organised in conjunction with the 2008 Linear Collider Workshop LCWS. As in the past, the workshop is supposed to bring detector and accelerator communities together. Results and plans from both worlds will be discussed in several joint plenary sessions.
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Chicago, ILC08, LCWS, LCWS08, UIC, United States
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