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Author archive: ilc-newsline

Prospects for linear collider calorimetry in China

30 April 2009 “How do you ‘see’ neutrons in a scintillator calorimetry?” asks Frank Simon a group of 40 students in the afternoon three days into a five-day “Calorimetry for International Linear Collider” school, held from 22 to 26 April in Beijing. The spring in Beijing is just over outside the classroom on the CCAST campus, and the Chinese students who traveled from many academic institutions across mainland China, such as Tsinghua University, Institute of High Energy Physics Chinese Academy of Science (IHEP) and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), eagerly hitch forward in their seats. “Have you played billiards?” An excellent lecturer himself (and a blogger for Quantum Diaries), Simon effectively delivers his ideas as the students speak up. What target would take away momentum from neutrons? Exactly, the mass equivalent of neutrons, the protons. Hydrogen in the active medium makes the detector, and thus the plastic scintillator, sensitive to neutrons. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , ,

Impressions from TILC09

23 April 2009 Big international meetings always mean a lot of preparation for many people — not only for the local organisers like the team who smoothly and perfectly hosted the 200+-participant meeting held in Tsukuba, Japan, until Tuesday this week. Participants have to prepare for these meetings as well. The TILC09 workshop was particularly intense for the whole community: half of the participants had just passed a phase of night-long writing and editing sessions for the Letters of Intent (LOI) for the ILC detector concepts, while the other half spent weeks preparing for an internal review of the accelerator held all of last week. The accelerator review report will be published in the coming weeks and detector concept validation will be presented this autumn. See the photo album for a few impressions. Photos: Nobu Toge, Perrine Royole-Degieux Category: Around the World, Slideshow | Tagged: ,

From SLAC Today: A Flight Simulator for the World’s Smallest Beam

2 April 2009 Commissioning has begun at the Japan-based Accelerator Test Facility 2, a major technology test bed for future accelerators, including the proposed International Linear Collider, or ILC. During the two-year commissioning process, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory physicists are shuttling back and forth to KEK, the high-energy accelerator lab in Tsukuba, to join an international team of scientists working around the clock to get the accelerator's final focus system up and running. When fully commissioned, this system will squeeze the facility's electron beam down to a slender ribbon just 35 nanometers thick—the narrowest beam of particles ever achieved. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

CALICE meeting in Korea

26 March 2009 This is the second report on the two detector meetings held in Korea in February, ILD and CALICE, this time focusing on the CALICE (Calorimeter for the linear collider experiment) collaboration spring meeting at Kyungpook National University in Daegu on 19 and 20 February. CALICE, launched in 2002, meets twice a year to discuss the R&D issues of calorimetry technologies and the large-scale test beam experiments, specifically in the recent meetings to prepare for the world’s first test on a digital hadron calorimeter. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

Life after the LOI

19 March 2009 A Silicon Detector (SiD) workshop was held at SLAC from 2 to 4 March, with the express purpose of reviewing the status of the SiD Letter of Intent, organising the final steps in its completion, and beginning to think of life after the LOI. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

Detector developers meet in Korea

5 March 2009 In mid February detector scientists from around the world met in two subsequent detector meetings held in Korea: the ILD (International Large Detector) Workshop at Ewha Campus Complex in Seoul from 16 to 18 February and the CALICE (Calorimeter for the Linear Collider Experiment) Collaboration Spring Meeting at Kyungpook National University in Daegu from 19 to 20 February. Category: Around the World | Tagged: ,

Past successes in superconducting RF are a good omen for the ILC

26 February 2009 One of the high-value R&D programmes for the ILC is to reliably reach gradients of 35 Megavolts per metre (MV/m) in one-metre long (9-cell, 1.3-Gigahertz) niobium cavities, the heart of the main linac. More than a dozen such cavities have demonstrated gradients between 35 and 40 MV/m at DESY, and more recently at Jlab. The challenge is to hit such performance levels nearly every time, and with nearly every cavity! This means that we need to conduct some good science to understand the basic nature of the gradient limits, and clever engineering to invent methods to overcome these. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

From Fermilab: Collaboration between Fermilab, Indian institutions sets stage for future accelerators

26 February 2009 INDORE, India (February 10, 2009) - The Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., today announced the signing of a new Memorandum of Understanding with four Indian institutions. The MOU establishes collaboration in the areas of superconducting acceleration science and technology and in research and development of superconducting materials. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

From CERN: CERN management confirms new LHC restart schedule

12 February 2009 Geneva, 9 February 2009. CERN management today confirmed the restart schedule for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resulting from the recommendations from last week’s Chamonix workshop. The new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October. A short technical stop has also been foreseen over the Christmas period. The LHC will then run through to autumn next year, ensuring that the experiments have adequate data to carry out their first new physics analyses and have results to announce in 2010. The new schedule also permits the possible collisions of lead ions in 2010. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

From Jefferson Lab News: ILC treatment of JLab cavity garners exciting result

5 February 2009 For the last few years, Jefferson Lab staff members have used the lab's unique facilities to test various accelerator components for a proposed next-generation collider, the International Linear Collider. Reminiscent of a stack of doughnuts, accelerator components called cavities energize particles for use in experiments that explore the smallest bits of matter. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , ,