Experimental physics plays many roles in advancing science. We make lots of measurements that help enable us to describe the physical world. We test theories and sometimes it leads to surprising discoveries that change our understanding of the physical world. Part of doing and advancing science is experimentally checking the correctness of our description of […]
A front row seat at the Granada linear collider workshop
With a watchful eye on the physics that is beginning to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland, as well as the process for updating the European strategy for particle physics, the lepton collider community is moving incrementally towards speaking with one voice! The International Workshop for Future Linear Colliders (LCWS11) held in […]
Japan Society for Promotion of Science supports ILC detector R&D
The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) has awarded a new five-year award for ILC detector R&D. A kickoff meeting for this grant was held at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan from 12-14 September. The new programme is descriptively entitled “a global R&D program of a state-of-the-art detector system for ILC.” The research […]
GDE position paper on post-TDR
The Global Design Effort (GDE) will complete the final deliverable in our mandate with the completion of the Technical Design Report (TDR). We intend to submit the TDR at the end of 2012, and with reviews and approval of the report, including required revisions, we expect our present task to be completed by about mid-2013. […]
The LHC performance and prospects
The Tevatron at Fermilab, US, was turned off last week and now the high energy frontier has officially moved across the Atlantic Ocean to CERN and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. We have great expectations for LHC physics, since historically higher energy has been our most effective probe to new discoveries in particle […]
Costing the ILC Technical Design Report
For a very large potential project like the ILC, costs are obviously a very big issue. Reliably costing such large projects with ambitious new technologies, in advance of having a detailed technical design and implementation plan, is a real challenge. In addition, costing is done differently in different countries, making it particularly difficult to provide […]
Particle physics: opportunities for the future
Last week in this column I discussed a special tribute to the Tevatron made at the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society conference at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from 9-13 August. This week I will share some of the key points I made in my concluding remarks for […]
Celebrating the Tevatron
The Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society held a major conference for the field at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from 9-13 August. A very interesting feature of the meeting was a celebration of the Tevatron, in anticipation of its being turned off later this month. The CERN Large […]
Technical baseline reviews: damping rings
Over the past two years, the GDE has concentrated its efforts on advancing critical ILC R&D in order to reduce risks and to demonstrate performance. In parallel, we have established a new, more coherent and more cost-effective baseline to be used for the next phase of developing the technical design that will be incorporated in […]
GDE Executive Committee meeting at Caltech
The GDE Executive Committee held an important face-to-face meeting at Caltech in the US from 19 – 20 July 2011. Having established the new baseline for the ILC Technical Design Report (TDR) this past spring, the meeting concentrated on detailed planning for R&D, design and the actual scope and content of the report, which is […]