Why are we confident the ILC can be built in a seismic country?
In August 2013, the International Linear Collider site evaluation committee of Japan announced that they evaluated a site in Kitakami as the best candidate location in Japan for the ILC. The exciting news came after meticulous preparation and study to ensure that the site was suitable for the 31-kilometre linear collider. Among the most important […]
The Compact Linear Collider and International Linear Collider will accelerate particles and create collisions in different ways. Nonetheless, the detector concepts under development share many commonalities. CERN physicist Dominik Dannheim explains that CLIC detector plans are adaptations of the ILC detector designs with a few select modifications. “When we started several years ago, we did […]
When particles collide, they often produce sprays of new particles called jets. Given the complexity of these particles’ interactions, measuring the energy of jets with high precision is a formidable challenge. New detector designs, such as those being developed for the ILC and CLIC, are based on a paradigm called particle flow which will allow […]
As hundreds of particle bunches pass through an accelerator, physicists need to steer them into collision at specific locations within the detector’s centre. But given how tiny these particles are, it can happen that beams of particles cross and yet no collisions occur. To maximise the chances of collision at the interaction point, the beams […]
The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is designed to bring electrons and positrons into collision at 3 TeV within just 50 kilometres. To reach that collision energy, a typical accelerator design would be anything but compact– easily spanning more than one hundred kilometres. “You would need tens of thousands of klystrons,” says CERN scientist Steffen Doebert. […]
The term cavity gradient is used to describe the electric field that accelerates a particle. This reflects the most basic purpose of each cavity. “What you want out of a cavity is to give a particle more energy than it had before,” says Fermilab physicist Andy Hocker. Cavity gradient determines the rate of this change: […]
Superconducting cavities accelerate particles using radiofrequency (RF) power. But where does the power to accelerate a beam by millions of electronvolts come from? The ILC’s power source can provide only about 100 watts, but to push that power up to the required level you need a device called a klystron. The klystron is a power amplifier. […]
Everything has a limit—superconducting cavities are no exception. Physicists put voltage in their superconducting cavities to boost the energy of particles. But it’s possible to ask for too much from a cavity. When this happens, the cavity fails: the superconducting material becomes normal conducting, the voltage collapses and the energy escapes. This is called a […]
Particles in a collider aren’t necessarily evenly dispersed along the beam path. Instead they’re often clumped together in bunches with space in between. The series of bunches are sometimes called a bunch train, a pulse, or simply ‘the beam’. When particles enter a collider, the source sends them out in bunches. In the ILC, for […]
Physicists need to understand each accelerator cavity individually before assembling a collider. One of the cavity characteristics physicists measure is called the cavity quality factor, Q factor for short. One way to understand the Q factor is to pick up a bell. Let the clapper tap the bell edge once. You’ll notice that just one […]