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Author archive: Elizabeth Clements

Windy city prepares for ALCPG07

| 13 September 2007 Get ready for deep-dish pizza and hot dogs piled high with onions, peppers and a pickle because the 2007 American Linear Collider Physics Group and International Linear Collider Global Design Effort meetings are heading for the windy city. Fermilab, located just outside Chicago, Illinois, will host the joint ALCPG07 meeting on 22-26 October in a continuing series of workshops on the physics, detector and accelerator issues of the proposed ILC. Interested participants should register soon, as the deadline to book a hotel room is 21 September. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Piece by piece

| 6 September 2007 The 1200 parts started to arrive at Fermilab in June. When fully assembled, these many parts will make up the first cryomodule for International Linear Collider R&D in the United States. The ILC will ultimately require 1680 of these cooled modules that hold the superconducting cavities, maintaining a temperature only two degrees above absolute zero. This first US cryomodule -which will only be used for R&D purposes-represents a special collaboration between Fermilab and DESY. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

Good vibrations at Fermilab

| 9 August 2007 Vibrations in the cryomodules in the International Linear Collider are actually not a good thing. The slightest disruption can throw off the alignment of the super sensitive beams and prevent them from colliding. The stringent beam dynamic requirements in the ILC therefore make vibration studies important, which is why Fermilab recently installed measuring devices called geophones in their Horizontal Test Stand. So for the team at Fermilab, detecting vibrations now, during an R&D phase, is actually a good thing because it means that they can learn how to minimise them in the actual machine when every collision counts. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

University Profile: Northern Illinois University

| 12 July 2007 Amidst the corn fields in DeKalb Illinois, 65 miles to the west of Chicago, a group of 22 physicists and students, who are members of the Northern Illinois Center for Accelerator and Detector Development (NICADD) at Northern Illinois University, contribute to the International Linear Collider in more ways than one. From beam dynamics to calorimetry hardware to simulation software, the ILC group at NIU covers it all. Because the group consists of such a large number of undergraduate and graduate students, training the future generation of scientists – who may be running the actual ILC one day – is perhaps one of their largest contributions of all. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

Collaborating for the beam

| 5 July 2007 When the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) group at KEK decided to upgrade their beam position monitor system in 2005, Marc Ross had a solution. Based at SLAC at the time, he was a longtime collaborator with KEK and familiar with the instrumentation systems used throughout Fermilab’s accelerator complex. In 2006, Ross became the head of Fermilab’s Technical Division and could see how to continue his initiated beam position monitor upgrade efforts at the ATF damping ring. Called Echotek boards, these digital signal processing based systems offer a higher resolution potential – a characteristic that allows physicists to see more details about the beam. As it turned out, Fermilab was willing to make several Echotek boards available for testing the ATF system. Hence a new collaboration was born. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , , ,

DOE and NSF Review US Detector R&D Programme

| 28 June 2007 The cacophonous tune of cicadas serenaded the physicists at last week’s Department of Energy and National Science Foundation review of the US Detector R&D Programme for the International Linear Collider. Harry Weerts, the High Energy Physics Director at Argonne National Laboratory, where the review took place, vividly remembered the last time the cicadas visited --17 years ago when another detector milestone was in the making. “I remember it well because we were commissioning the DZero detector at Fermilab,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the next time the cicadas come around and seeing what the world looks like then.” Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , , ,

From symmetry magazine: When the new neighbour’s a giant

| 21 June 2007 Mike Herlihy is active in the village of North Aurora, near Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and west of Chicago. He’s been a village trustee for six years, belongs to the Lions Club and served on an advisory committee to evaluate a proposed freeway. As a principal in a roofing company with a background in civil engineering, he’s particularly familiar with construction and how it can affect a community. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

ILC industry thinks outside the box

| 31 May 2007 What do the International Linear Collider and nuclear waste transmutation, cargo inspection or food and water sterilisation have in common? Technology. The same technology that the ILC will use to explore the fundamental nature of the universe may also have potential applications in other areas of science and industry. This is what a group of ILC scientists and industry met to discuss at an ILC Technical Applications Workshop on 15 May in Dulles, Virginia. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

Fermilab’s new Horizontal Test Stand sees its first cavity

| 24 May 2007 The newest resident in Fermilab’s Meson Detector Building is up and running. Last week, Fermilab scientists installed a nine-cell 1.3 GHz TESLA-style cavity into a cryostat in order to commission the new Horizontal Test Stand. Designed to test both 3.9 Ghz and 1.3 Ghz 9-cell niobium cavities, the Horizontal Test Stand will play an important role in the growing ILC R&D programme at Fermilab. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Feedback wanted on Detector Concept Report

| 17 May 2007 RDR meet your other half. A draft version of the Detector Concept Report for the International Linear Collider is now available online. In February, the Global Design Effort published the draft Reference Design Report, providing the first detailed technical snapshot of the accelerator. The DCR completes the picture and makes the physics and detector case for the ILC. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,