Director’s Corner 9 February 2006 Barry Barish U.S. Budget News In last week’s column on the role of the GDE R&D Board (RDB), I made the statement that "the continuing and future R&D programs will be absolutely crucial for demonstrating critical elements of the design, optimizing it with respect to cost and performance, and finally […]
R&D Board
Director’s Corner 2 February 2006 Barry Barish R&D Board A decade or so ago, the thought of building a TeV scale linear collider was pretty much just a romantic notion. The long extrapolations from present accelerators and from proven technologies were daunting. But, mostly as a direct result of more than a decade of […]
RDR Kick-off
Director’s Corner 26 January 2006 Barry Barish RDR Kick-off Our major theme for the past six months has been to establish a basic “configuration” for the International Linear Collider. The GDE process got underway last August at Snowmass and culminated in our approval of a “strawman” configuration at a meeting in Frascati, Italy in December. […]
InDiCo – Integrated Digital Conferencing
Director’s Corner 19 January 2006 Barry Barish InDiCo – Integrated Digital Conferencing One of the biggest challenges for our dispersed GDE effort is communications! This was apparent from the beginning and, as a result, I have continually emphasized the need for us to employ the most advanced electronic communications and web tools. I created a […]
Design Cost Board
Director’s Corner 12 January 2006 Barry Barish Design Cost BoardAt Frascati, I created three boards that will become the centerpiece of the GDE organization as we now move forward from having determined the baseline for the ILC towards doing the technical design for a construction project. Today, I want to introduce the new GDE Design […]
Happy New Year
Director’s Corner 5 January 2006 Barry Barish Happy New Year As this New Year begins, I would like to briefly remark on our progress and status to date, as we begin to undertake a new set of tasks and goals for 2006. During this past year, the GDE was formed, first by my appointment as […]
Change Control Board
Director’s Corner 15 December 2005 Barry Barish Change Control Board Last week at Frascati, we successfully established the baseline configuration that will serve as the basis for the ILC reference design and costing to be carried out next year. There was consensus on most decisions. I would characterize the final configuration as somewhat conservative, […]
Frascati News
Director’s Corner 8 December 2005 Barry Barish Frascati News This week the GDE is in Frascati, Italy. We have come together for what is only our second face-to-face meeting, following our kick-off meeting as part of the Snowmass workshop just over three months ago. The main goal, finalizing the baseline configuration, represents the successful completion […]
One Tunnel or Two
Director’s Corner 1 December 2005 Barry Barish One Tunnel or Two? Should we build the ILC using one underground tunnel? Or should we build it using two adjacent tunnels, one containing the support instrumentation and the other containing the accelerator? These sound like innocuous questions, but they present one of the more complex and […]
Damping Ring Recommendation
Director’s Corner23 November 2005 Barry Barish Damping Ring RecommendationReaching the luminosity goals of the ILC will be an enormous challenge. It will require producing nanometer scale beam spots at the collision point and a crucial element in achieving this will be to ‘damp’ the beams that come from the electron and positron sources to have […]