Theorists and experimentalists meet at CERN to discuss future colliders
When talking about what they know and what they want to find out, physicists like to speak about ‘landscapes’. There are the well-chartered lands of the Standard Model and undiscovered territories like the Terascale – a region that the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN will enter when protons start colliding in autumn. With the […]
Conventional facilities crew hooks up with European XFEL experts
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 […]
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 […]
Part three of a series on how the CESR storage ring turns into the CesrTA damping ring
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 […]
Large time projection chamber prototype is about to start its first test
TPC collaborators from across the globe fit the endcap onto the TPC field cage. Pressure gauge working? Check! 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 […]
Machine experts try to run DESY's free-electron laser under ILC-like conditions
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) […]
Discussions during the ILD meeting in Cambridge, UK, about the detector concept parameters continued in the coffee breaks… …and after hours. (Photos: DESY) “I know it is painful — nobody expected it to be fun,” Ties Behnke, standing in front of a detector audience in a lecture hall at Cambridge University, summed up the at […]
You can witness it even if you weren't there
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 […]
European ILC-HiGrade project officially launched
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 […]
Large TPC prototype field cage arrives for testing
When the TPC field cage arrived at DESY, all TPC collaboration members came to watch and help out. Photo: DESY 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” […]