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) […]
Committed to committees
As the new chair of the ILC Steering Committee (ILCSC), Enzo Iarocci will have to do a lot of negotiating. Not only with the other members of the Steering Committee or the ILC community, but most of all with his wife. “In this new position I will have to probably travel even more than I […]
Telescope arms open wide
The EUDET telescope, a high-precision device that lets detector developers check the accuracy of their prototype by using particle beams and the EUDET telescope and comparing with accurately its determined tracks, has just finished a marathon in test beams around Europe. During six weeks in beams at DESY and CERN its makers tested it to […]
On the way to the forum
Many scientists working on ILC detector simulation know: Mokka can give you sleepless nights. This has nothing to do with caffeine, however – Mokka is a software that lets you run full simulations of events in future ILC detectors. It uses the Geant4 simulation tool, and ILC detector people around the world use it – […]
LDC and GLD become ILD
Scientists are a self-organised and democratic lot. As such, they like bottom-up approaches: ask everybody involved, test all options and find the best and most logical consensus. The most recent example of this approach is the cooperation between the two detector concepts the Large Detector Concept and the Global Large Detector. Starting from first ideas […]
Lesson-Learning from CMS
Alain Hervé already has the experience of building two enormous detectors under his belt, and it looks like he is going to help in a third one. Technical coordinator at CERN of both L3 at LEP and CMS at the LHC, the Breton has now been called as an expert to help in the interaction […]
Live from the test beam: calorimetry rises from the ashes
This summer, a stage was all the world for some of the men and women of the CALICE collaboration. For the first time, the full prototypes of the electromagnetic calorimeter, the hadronic calorimeter and the tailcatcher and muon tracker (designed and built by international collaborations and assembled in Paris, Hamburg and Northern Illinois respectively) played […]
Getting the interaction point right
Like the rest of society, the ILC community is split into two categories: the early risers and the night owls. Workshop organiser Andrei Seryi considers himself a night owl. Nevertheless he is up at 5 and in the lab at 6 am many days per week these weeks, holding phone meetings with the rest of […]
High grades for HiGrade
It’s the age of electronic mail, but in the last weeks Eckhard Elsen from DESY took several trips per day to his snail mail in-tray down the corridor because he was waiting for an important letter. Then finally a letter and an email arrived from Brussels saying that contract negotiations for a six-lab proposal managed […]
Mapping a magnet
Three pairs of eyes cast one last look around the room. Have all scissors, ladders, metallic tables been removed? No pins or pens lying around anymore? Once the team is sure that nothing is left in the area, they close the security doors and give the go-ahead – the magnet that has been to space […]