Director’s Corner 3 August 2006 Barry Barish presenting his closing plenary talk at VLCW06. Reflections on VLCW06: Physics and Detectors The University of British Columbia, located in beautiful Vancouver, was the venue of a joint American Linear Collider Planning Group (ALCPG) and GDE workshop, attended by 300 participants from 19-23 July. The programme ranged from […]
Building and Testing a String of Cryomodules – a Task for S2
Director’s Corner 27 July 2006 Barry Barish Building and Testing a String of Cryomodules – a Task for S2 An ambitious and crucial goal of the ILC R&D programme is to build and test a string of superconducting RF cryomodules that operate at or near the design gradient. Achieving such a milestone would help optimise […]
Demonstrating the ILC Accelerating Gradient
Director’s Corner 6 July 2006 Barry Barish Demonstrating the ILC Accelerating Gradient The central element of the ILC concept is the superconducting RF technology that will be used to accelerate electrons and positrons in the main linac. The choice of accelerating gradient is perhaps the single most important decision we have made, since it determines […]
Sokendai Linear Collider Accelerator School
Director’s Corner 29 June 2006 Barry Barish Sokendai Linear Collider Accelerator School Not long after I became GDE Director, and even before I had recruited our initial design team, I gave a plenary talk on my ideas and plans for the ILC design effort at the Particle Accelerator Conference (PAC05) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. While […]
How Many Magnets Make a Linear Collider
Director’s Corner 22 June 2006 Barry Barish How Many Magnets Make a Linear Collider? Magnets that steer beams around a ring-shaped accelerator, that focus particle beams and that make various optical corrections are key to building such high-energy particle accelerators. But, will magnets be so important for a linear collider, a particle accelerator that is […]
Able was I ere I saw Elba
Director’s Corner 15 June 2006 Barry Barish "Able was I ere I saw Elba" This famous palindrome was purportedly spoken by Napoleon when referring to his first sighting of Elba, the island where the British exiled him in 1814. One cannot help but wonder what they had in mind when they put Napoleon and a […]
FALC Grapples with its Governance
Director’s Corner 1 June 2006 Barry Barish FALC Grapples with its Governance Last week I attended the meeting of the Funding Agencies for the Linear Collider (FALC) at the INFN Headquarters in a historic building nestled in the small twisty streets near the Pantheon and Piazza Navona in the heart of beautiful old Rome. […]
Einsteins Telescope
Director’s Corner 25 May 2006 Barry Barish Einstein’s Telescope One of the most intriguing features of the ILC is its potential to act as a telescope to "explore energies a trillion times that of the accelerator itself, in the ultrahighenergy realm where physicists believe that all of nature’s forces become one." Einstein spent much of […]
New Look and New Logo
Director’s Corner 18 May 2006 Barry Barish New Look and New Logo Today we inaugurate a new look for the ILC website, as well as a new logo. We have strived to make our website as functional as possible, while also making it attractive. The site is still a work in progress, and we […]
Baseline Damping Rings
Director’s Corner 11 May 2006 Barry Barish Baseline Damping Rings One of the more difficult decisions we made last fall was which damping ring option to choose for our baseline. No recommendation came out of the Snowmass Workshop and our damping ring working group continued to study the question through much of the fall. […]