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 […]
Accelerator Advisory Panel to help Project Managers
The TILC08 meeting in Sendai saw the first gathering of the new Accelerator Advisory Panel (AAP). Other than the yet to be established Project Advisory Committee, which will be formed following a request from the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC) and will consist mainly of machine and detector experts from outside the ILC community, […]
A different kind of Terascale
Have you ever used a map to find an electron? Not possible, you say? Think again. Spell it slightly differently – MAPS – put it into an electromagnetic calorimeter, and you may well be able to track an electron in a calorimeter and see the single electrons in a particle shower. With a spatial granularity […]
TILC08 beyond the agenda
At the end of a productive working day, a long journey, a hard job or a rewarding week, Japanese people have a very useful phrase that expresses everything from gratitude and pride to exhaustion: Otsukare sama deshita, or simply otsukare. Even though not all participants of last week’s TILC08 meeting may be aware of the expression, all […]
ICFA Statement on Funding for the Linear Collider
The ICFA chair greeted TILC08 participants via recorded video message. What do you do when you are director of a lab and chairman of a large international committee and have been invited to different events on different continents on the same day, assuming you don’t have clones? You try to attend both — at least […]
Wise counsel for Europe
Even – or especially ? – directors cannot have their eyes everywhere. They need to gather information and be able to judge things – but how do you do this on a continent where labs can be 3,000 kilometres apart, every country has different forms of governance, and science policy and funding agencies couldn’t be […]
Accelerating past the finishing line
It was supposed be the wrap-up meeting of a successful accelerator physics project. However, when the news came that the EU-funded EUROTeV was going to be extended, the meeting in Frascati, Italy, from 23 to 25 January turned into both a summary and a future-planning session. “We’ve got another year to go and the project […]
New SCRF test facility at Oak Ridge
At first glance a neutron source used for materials research and a planned particle accelerator to answer questions about matter, forces and the origins of the Universe might not seem to have all that much in common. At least not to the non-accelerator experts among us. At second glance, however, similarities and overlaps appear that […]
A horizontal challenge
The world’s first horizontal multi-beam klystron has started its site acceptance test at DESY. Built by the Japanese company Toshiba, it is the first of three prototypes from different companies to arrive for the test that will determine whether the new klystron design works. The 10-megawatt horizontal klystron was developed for the European X-ray Free […]
EUROTeV encore
People with big plans need time and space to make their dreams come true – assuming that they already have some money to get going. The time for the European-funded linear collider R&D consortium EUROTeV was almost up. Together with the CALICE collaboration, they were making plans for a virtual control room for next spring […]