Harry Weerts in his Directors Corner article on 11 August described the upcoming year-end changes to the ILC programme in both the LCC organisation and the accelerator design efforts. Since that time the ILC accelerator team has been assessing the impact of the change in direction of the US programme with the emphasis switching from design […]
Coming up: the ECFA Linear Collider Workshop
In a global collaboration most of the personal interactions take place electronically, so our bi-annual linear collider workshops take on extra significance as one of the few opportunities to provide high-bandwidth (face-to-face) communication. For the accelerator community the upcoming Santander Workshop will enable progress in the ILC design to be both examined and where appropriate […]
Political progress
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies – Groucho Marx Notwithstanding Groucho Marx’s somewhat idiosyncratic sentiments concerning the profession of politics, a project as large as the ILC will inevitably create a political test that will be every bit as challenging as the […]
Bright lights, big city – the ILC comes to town
Last week during the Asian Regional Workshop ALCW 2015 held in Tsukuba, the ILC broke with the tradition of staying in one place when the workshop participants moved en masse to Tokyo for what is best described as a multicultural extravaganza in support of the International Linear Collider. Taking advantage of the workshop’s location in Japan […]
A year with the ILC
At this time in the calendar it is difficult to avoid the temptation to look back at the past year and ahead to the upcoming one. I have proved unable to successfully fight that impulse so the first Directors Corner of 2015 involves some personal observations and conjectures both past and future. For the ILC, […]
In preparation for LCWS 14
One of the challenges involved in an international project is that of maintaining good communication among the collaboration members. While the detector community has learned over the years to adapt to this situation, typically accelerator design has been centred at a host laboratory that provided the technical leadership. The ILC design team with its global […]
The roadmap for high-energy physics in the US from P5
Around October 2012 the US high-energy physics (HEP) community and funding agencies started a strategic exercise to create a roadmap for the future of high-energy physics in the USA. The first step was the initiation of the Snowmass process to review the complete science status of the field. This culminated in the Snowmass 2013 meeting […]
The ILC design evolves
The ILC baseline design as described in the Technical Design Report and its associated cost estimate was finalised in 2012. Since that time the design has been relatively static while the global high-energy physics community absorbed and responded to this information. During the past 12 months, significant progress in Japan has resulted in the choice […]
Planning for the future of the US high-energy-physics programme
The US High Energy Physics (HEP) programme is presently guided by a roadmap put together in 2008 by US Department of Energy (DOE) High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). Since that time the global HEP situation has continued to evolve in regards to both the physics (most notably the Higgs boson) and international HEP planning […]
The challenge of technology
Mastery of difficult technologies is in the DNA of high-energy physics and the accelerators that enable the science. For many decades ever increasing beam energies and intensities have given rise to not just spectacular science results but also to a well documented stream of technical innovations which have resulted in spin-offs in many non-related fields. […]