Early in this new century I chaired the committee that was charged with making the difficult decision whether to pursue the design of a high energy electron-positron linear collider based on ‘warm’ (room temperature) or ‘cold’ (superconducting) cavities. Our committee made a decisive forward-looking decision to base the design on superconducting RF accelerating cavities. Springing from that […]
A dream comes true
More than a decade before becoming Director of the newly forming Global Design Effort (GDE) for the ILC in 2005, I took on the task of directing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Like the ILC, LIGO was an incredibly challenging project with potentially a fantastic scientific payoff. Of course, we had our critics […]
Ten Years and Counting…
Former GDE Director Barry Barish revisits the project he led for eight years
Many of the striking advances in particle physics during the particle collider era have resulted directly from the complementarity of hadron-hadron and electron-positron colliders. Unfortunately, it is not practical to build a complementary circular electron-positron collider for the LHC capable of reaching center-of-mass energies of about 1 TeV (tera electronvolt) because of the large amount of […]
The Global Design Effort completes its mandate in style and substance
The Global Design Effort has completed its mandate to produce a technical design for the ILC. Yesterday’s official handover of the Technical Design Report to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) was the culmination of a celebratory three continent event this week. The discovery of a Higgs particle at the LHC at CERN, the […]
Demonstrating the ILC final focus parameters
A key feature of the ILC is that it is a single-pass machine. In contrast to a circular accelerator, where the beam goes around many times, the ILC beams pass through each accelerator element only once, including the interaction point. For the accelerator, this means that for each accelerating module, the machine must be very […]
ILC TDR cost under review
The final deliverable of the Global Design Effort, the ILC Technical Design Report, was completed and submitted in draft form to the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC) in November 2012. Following a successful technical review in December, an international cost review of the TDR ILC value estimate was chaired by Norbert Holtkamp of SLAC […]
A time of transition, or When men and mountains meet
The past few years, we have made a great deal of progress in developing and demonstrating the enabling technologies needed for a linear collider for the two concepts that are being pursued: the International Linear Collider (ILC), based on Superconducting RF acceleration; and a potentially higher-energy option, the Compact Linear Collider study (CLIC), based on […]
TDR review season is underway
The final deliverable for the Global Design Effort (GDE) is the Technical Design Report (TDR) for the ILC. We completed a draft TDR last November and submitted it for review. The accelerator volumes of the TDR consist of one volume on the R&D programme accomplishments and future programme and a second volume on the ILC […]
Happy New Year! Reflections on 2012
Last year was an especially exciting year for particle physics with the discovery of a 126-GeV particle that appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson. This event is likely to be the most important discovery in decades: the observation of a new kind of particle that signals the mechanism for creating mass in the universe. […]
Mitigating electron cloud effects for the ILC
The next generation of particle accelerators will contain intense bunches of particle beams. These intense beams have the disadvantage that they create electron clouds that result from beam scattering off residual molecules in the vacuum chambers. The concern is that the presence of electron clouds can reduce performance by scattering and defocusing the incoming particle […]