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 […]
First cryomodule moves into NML
Progress at Fermilab's ILCTA
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. The first cryomodule on its way into the NML hall at Fermilab… …on the hook… […]
ECFA meets at DESY
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 […]
Time to recover
Cornell University is testing a prototype injector for an Energy Recovery Linac
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 […]
Damping starts this week
CesrTA kick-off meeting marks the beginning of the damping ring test programme
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 […]
Second sound sounds promising
Cornell proposes new cavity temperature mapping technique
Is it a microphone? Is it a thermometer? It’s an oscillating superleak transducer! Cornell’s re-entrant nine-cell cavity was tested with the second-sound method. The yellow dot shows where a quench occurred. “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 […]
Cryo crash test
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 […]
Hail Cesr
Part one of a series on how a storage ring at Cornell University morphs into a damping ring test accelerator
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 […]
On the costing trail
Project Management office plans the future of the cost estimate
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 […]
Spin doctors
Polarisation and polarimetry experts meet for the first time
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, […]