Barbara Warmbein | 7 June 2007
On Tuesday 5 June, the German Federal Minister of Education and Research Annette Schavan officially launched the European X-ray laser facility XFEL. Using essentially the same uperconducting accelerator technology that is planned for the ILC, the 3.4-kilometre XFEL (for X-ray free-electron laser) will produce high-intensity ultra-short X-ray flashes with the properties of laser light. This will open up a whole range of new perspectives for fundamental research and for industrial users.
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Around the World | Tagged:
Germany, XFEL
Barbara Warmbein | 31 May 2007
In a packed auditorium many of world's leading high-energy physics brains celebrated ‘one of the sculptors of the physics of the ILC which wouldn’t be doable without him’, said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, DESY, and ‘not just a colleague, more of a friend’, said Siegfried Bethke, Max Planck Institute for Physics. Last Tuesday, a day before the start of the ILC / LCWS 07 symposium, they had gathered for a colloquium in honour of theorist Peter Zerwas, who is retiring at the age of 65, ‘after more than 250 publications, 12000 citations and certainly many more to come’, said Albrecht Wagner, DESY Director-General.
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DESY
Barbara Warmbein | 24 May 2007
Challenges are all around for cavities that want to perform well. The material they are made of, the way they have been cleaned, they way they are shaped and they way their cells are welded together all influence the way the electrons fly through them. A process called hydroforming might be a means to tackle the last two threats, and a small team from DESY has just created the first all-niobium hydroformed nine-cell cavity.
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Feature | Tagged:
hydroforming
Barbara Warmbein | 17 May 2007
All German universities and research institutes involved in the LHC and ILC have just pocketed 25 million Euros – and the prospect of a bright future at the Terascale. A DESY-driven funding proposal for the project ‘Helmholtz Alliance: Physics at the Terascale’ was approved by the senate of the Helmholtz Association on Tuesday this week. It bundles resources and expertise in German particle physics to allow scientists to play leading roles in particular in the LHC– and of course also the ILC.
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Around the World | Tagged:
German Helmholtz Alliance, Germany, Terascale Alliance
Barbara Warmbein | 26 April 2007
Interactions members now officially classify as a tribe: flocking round the warming fire against the Californian chill they shared a goat during their meeting at SLAC last week. But though food may be memorable during the meetings of the InterAction collaboration, discussions and strategic plans are even more important for the communication representatives of particle physics labs, universities and projects. LHC start-up, the future of ILC communication and the meaning of blogs were just a few of the topics on the agenda of the three-day meeting that brought together 16 core and about 10 extended members of the InterAction family. They welcomed two new faces: Rika Takahashi, who has just taken up her job as ILC communicator for Asia at KEK, and Romeo Bassoli from INFN.
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Around the World | Tagged:
InterAction Collaboration, SLAC
Barbara Warmbein | 19 April 2007
Not many people see an immediate connection between exploring the origins of the Universe and finding cancer cells. Nicola d'Ascenzo and his colleagues sure do. In their work to test photo sensors as potential candidates for an ILC hadronic calorimeter they have come across a sensor that could be extremely interesting for positron emission tomography or PET, an imaging techniques that identifies cancerous cells in a body by detecting emitted gamma rays.
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Around the World | Tagged:
CALICE, DESY, detector R&D, MPPC, SiPM
Barbara Warmbein | 29 March 2007
When scientists take their detector prototypes to a test beam they enter a parallel world. Many basic needs are put on hold - the need for sunlight, regular meals or eight hours of sleep, for example. What counts is the beam time: you have three days, weeks or months to test your equipment, and you have to make the best of it because you might not get another chance. A team from Japan and Korea have just reached the halfway point of their time in the DESY test beam, calibrating, checking and recording data with their electromagnetic calorimeter prototype.
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Feature | Tagged:
CALICE, DESY, detector R&D, ECal, HCal
Barbara Warmbein | 22 March 2007
Not all vibrations are good. With their 600 nanometres in width and only 6 nanometres in height, the ILC's particle beams could easily be veered off course if parts in the accelerating modules, for example the final focus quadrupole, moved by only a few nanometers. Monitoring and feedback systems will make sure that this doesn't happen, but it's even better to identify weak - moving - points and eliminate them from the very beginning.
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Around the World | Tagged:
accelerator R&D, EUROTeV, geophone, seismometer, vibrations
Barbara Warmbein | 1 March 2007
Module 6 has had a bit of a break since we last reported on its progress (NewsLine 11 May 2006 and NewsLine 15 June 2006). It spent the last few months in DESY’s new module test stand in a brand-new building – as sparkling as new buildings in research centres get – and hasn’t been idle. Several cooling cycles and all sorts of tests over several months made sure that its creators knew the exact behaviour of all cavities, cables and couplers, the slow and fast tuners and the magnet.
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Feature | Tagged:
DESY, FLASH, horizontal test stand, module 6
Barbara Warmbein | 11 January 2007
"The most important skill of any secretary is to know the experts. You don't have to be able to do everything yourself, but you have to know who to ask!" Ramona Matthes is a secretary at DESY and together with two colleagues and a couple of scientists form the core of the local organising committee for the Linear Collider Workshop and GDE meeting that will take place at DESY from 30 May to 4 June 2007. In physicists' terms it is far too early to even think about this meeting, but in administrative terms the organising team did well to start in August last year – organising a meeting for up to 800 people isn't done in a couple of weeks, and there are many major and minor things that all have to work once the hordes of participants arrive. With three GDE meetings each year and many others at the side, every region of the ILC has learnt this, sometimes the hard way.
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Around the World | Tagged:
Japan, LCWS, LCWS07
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