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Author archive: Barbara Warmbein

Accelerator Advisory Panel to help Project Managers

| 3 April 2008 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, the AAP is an internal body, there to advise the Global Design Effort director and to give critical recommendations. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

A different kind of Terascale

| 20 March 2008 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 of 50 microns square– that's 50 thousandths of a millimetre – a potential sensor, called MAPS or monolithic active pixel sensor, for an ILC detector's digital electromagnetic calorimeter could be an efficient alternative to existing silicon technology. A UK-based group is currently evaluating how suitable this technology is for a calorimeter optimised for particle flow, with a view to seeing how efficient, reliable and cost-effective it is. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , ,

TILC08 beyond the agenda

| 13 March 2008 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 are almost certainly aware of the 'otsukare' feeling after several days of intense and rewarding parallel and plenary sessions, splinter meetings and social interaction. Here are some impressions from the meeting that did not make it onto the official agenda. Category: Around the World, Slideshow | Tagged: , , , ,

ICFA Statement on Funding for the Linear Collider

| 6 March 2008 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 virtually. Albrecht Wagner, DG of DESY in Hamburg and chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), gave an ICFA talk at the opening plenary of this week's TILC08 meeting that he had recorded earlier. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

Wise counsel for Europe

| 21 February 2008 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 harder to grasp? Global Design Effort European Regional Director Brian Foster has found his own solution. If a reasonable number of high-level European physicists and lab directors come together in one place, he often calls for a meeting of his Advisory Group. One of these European Advisory Group meetings has just happened at DESY, slotted in right after the ICFA and ILCSC meetings, to minimise travel. Category: Around the World | Tagged:

Accelerating past the finishing line

| 14 February 2008 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 is as useful now as it was at the kick-off meeting in 2004,” says scientific coordinator Nick Walker from DESY. The collaboration contributed big chunks of R&D to the Reference Design Report and thinks that most of the work can prove useful for projects beyond the ILC. “With the collected EUROTeV expertise in beam dynamics, optics design, positron source R&D and much more we’re almost regarded as an institution,” adds project coordinator Eckhard Elsen. Category: Feature | Tagged:

New SCRF test facility at Oak Ridge

| 24 January 2008 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 turn the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US into a small but powerful parallel experience for the ILC. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , ,

A horizontal challenge

| 17 January 2008 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 Electron Laser (XFEL) and is also part of the reference design for the ILC. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , ,

EUROTeV encore

| 29 November 2007 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 that would let them manage the experimental setup sitting in a testbeam at Fermilab remotely from a partitioned-off section of a corridor at DESY. This plan, along with many other tasks and plans run and made by EUROTeV people, is now reality: the European Commission extended the project by another year. Category: Feature | Tagged:

Holland in the ILC

| 15 November 2007 The Netherlands might not fill a lot of space on a map, but that does not mean that the Dutch aren’t filling crucial positions in many different high-energy physics projects – including the ILC. The proposed particle accelerator falls on a long list of projects in which the Dutch national institute for subatomic physics (NIKHEF) and renowned universities are involved: ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE at the LHC, Antares, a neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea, the Pierre Auger observatory, ZEUS, H1 and HERMES at HERA, D0, Babar, STAR… u vraagt, zij draaien (you name it, they’ve got it). Category: Around the World | Tagged: