Barbara Warmbein | 14 August 2008
Good news from an experimental hall at the edge of the prairie: Fermilab's ILC test area in the 'New Muon Lab' (NML) has just taken a major step towards completion with the installation of the first cryomodule on 6 August.
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cryomodule, Fermilab, NML
Barbara Warmbein | 31 July 2008
In their meeting a couple of days ago at DESY, ECFA, the European Committee for Future Accelerators, got a complete update on all present and future particle physics activities in Europe. They also discussed the ILC and its potential: “We think it is important to remember that particle physics in Europe is more than the LHC,” says the current ECFA chair Karlheinz Meier from Heidelberg university in Germany. “The community has to plan now, gather facts and lay foundations for future projects, and the ILC is a very good example for this.”
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DESY, ECFA
Barbara Warmbein | 31 July 2008
In a linear accelerator, energy conservation is not really on the achievement list. To get up to the required luminosity, accelerator experts have one chance to push the particle beams to their limits, putting much energy into the bunches, correcting, scraping and tweaking them along the way only to smash them into each other and direct the straggly remains into a dump. Not so an Energy Recovery Linac, currently at the design and first prototype stage at Cornell University. The electron beams also get dumped after one run, but before that happens, they are tricked into handing over their energy back to the superconducting machine that accelerated them.
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accelerator R&D, CESR, Cornell University, electron gun, energy recovery linac, ERL, injector
Barbara Warmbein | 10 July 2008
There may not have been a ribbon-cutting ceremony or speeches by heads of state. But the official kick-off of Cornell University's CESR storage ring as ILC damping ring test facility pleased the nearly 40 participants at this week's "Joint CesrTA Kickoff Meeting and ILC Damping Rings R&D Workshop (ILCDR08)" enormously. “CesrTA will give us a detailed picture of the how electron cloud builds up under a range of conditions, of how an ultra-low emittance positron beam interacts with the electron cloud, and of how beam instabilities driven by the electron cloud develop,” says Andy Wolski, damping ring group leader based at the Cockcroft Institute in the UK. “In this respect CesrTA plays a critical role in validating the decision to reduce costs by eliminating the second positron damping ring.”
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CESR, CesrTA, Cornell University, damping ring
Barbara Warmbein | 26 June 2008
“Our superconducting technology group here at Cornell is doing some very fundamental R&D,” says Hasan Padamsee, physics professor at Cornell university and expert in superconducting rf technology. “Note that the stress is on the fun in fundamentals.” Students are even allowed to drill holes into cavity prototypes in order to find out what makes certain areas in the material behave differently from others. A new mapping technique, invented by Cornell's Don Hartill, Zach Conway and Eric Smith, could make it possible to locate quenches during cavity tests with just eight (instead of up to 180) thermometers.
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accelerator R&D, cavity temperature mapping, Cornell University, oscillating superleak transducers, secound sound
Barbara Warmbein | 12 June 2008
Particle physicists have the reputation that they need to smash things up in order to find out what they are about. Sometimes accelerator physicists get to smash stuff up, too: a group of engineers and technicians recently crash-tested a full cryomodule. They wanted to find out what the 12-metre piece of kit would look like if somebody happened to use the beam pipe as a stepladder, drive a tunnel vehicle into a flange or decide to rip out a vacuum pump.
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cryomodule, DESY, FLASH, vacuum crash test, XFEL
Barbara Warmbein | 29 May 2008
Sometimes even pretty straightforward and remarkably logical ideas take several moves before they become a reality. Take the planned damping rings for the ILC, for example. In the ILC, compact bunches of electrons and positrons are made to collide at very high energy. In order to ensure a high rate of particle collisions, the bunches are cooled in damping rings prior to acceleration. In a cold bunch, the particles are all very close together and travelling in very nearly the same direction with very nearly the same velocity. (In a hot bunch, as in a hot pot of water, the particles are more dispersed and are all moving in different directions.)
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CESR, CesrTA, Cornell University, electron cloud, United States
Barbara Warmbein | 22 May 2008
Hamburg isn't exactly known for its good weather and hours of sunshine per year. So when the sun is out and nature is exploding with spring leaves and early summer blossoms, Hamburgers go to every length to spend those precious times outside. Spending a day in a conference room darkened for better presentations, hunched over microphones to listen to colleagues at the other end of the world doesn't normally rank high on the list of things to do in Hamburg when the weather is nice. Nevertheless one of the participants of last week's cost management meeting described their three days as "very enjoyable", meaning it. One has to work on the ILC to appreciate the spirit...
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cost estimate, DESY
Barbara Warmbein | 8 May 2008
Theorists and experimentalists aren't always of the same opinion. There is one thing on which opinions aren't polarised though, and that is polarisation. Polarisation is a special characteristic of a particle bunch – a sort of measure of the particles’ combined spin – that, when studied in the right sort of detector at the ILC, is supposed to give clues and answers on phenomena like the Higgs, supersymmetry or searches for new physics and extra dimensions. To study the collisions, and also to understand polarisation better, a few groups of a total of about 30 people around the world are designing and building polarimeters that measure the degree of polsarisation of the particles before and after collisions. They have just had their first 'collaboration' meeting at DESY in Zeuthen, near Berlin, Germany.
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beam delivery system, DESY, Germany, polarimeter, polarisation, polarised electron beam, polarised positron beam
Barbara Warmbein | 10 April 2008
When your day job means measuring the F2 structure function of the proton or hunting for the Higgs boson, you don't usually stop and wonder how exactly the ingredients of your events reached their collision point. Some 30 junior researchers have just learnt to do just this: at the recent 'Terascale Accelerator School', the first of its kind organised in Germany and a project of the Helmholtz Alliance, physics students turned into nuts-and-bolts accelerator experts for a week.
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DESY, German Helmholtz Alliance, Germany, school, terascale accelerator school
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