Newsline

Author archive: Perrine Royole-Degieux

CALICE gathers forces to design the calorimeters of the future

| 27 September 2007 The CALICE (Calorimeter for Linear Collider Experiment) collaboration is growing and anticipating the future of ILC calorimeters. The members not only prepare test-beams for the current generation of calorimeter prototypes, but they also prepare the future design of ILC sub-detectors. A record number of 72 CALICE members reviewed and discussed all these aspects two weeks ago in Prague during a collaboration meeting. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

XFEL coupler industrialisation at LAL

| 23 August 2007 During an XFEL (European X-ray laser facility) project meeting, on 2 July at DESY, the main European contributors discussed in-kind contributions for the project. The meeting attendees agreed that France would play a large role in the production of power couplers for the XFEL. The LAL coupler group, at Orsay, will therefore be responsible for following the coupler production, their commissioning and delivery to DESY. To accomplish these tasks, the lab is now pursuing a big effort focused on coupler industrialisation. “This effort will be an exemplary exercise for ILC couplers production,” said Alessandro Variola, head of the LAL group. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

The power of X rays for the ILC

| 19 July 2007 Producing intense polarised positrons for the ILC is very challenging. Stability, energy, luminosity are the key words. Parallel to the baseline studies on a helical undulator-based source (see Newsline from 19 October 2006), other groups, like the laser group at LAL (IN2P3/CNRS), Orsay (France), pursue R&D on a Compton positron source. The Orsay team recently measured an unprecedented enhancement factor of the pulsed laser beam inside their Fabry-Perot cavity. They expect bigger factors in a few months. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

ILC also challenges electronics

| 5 July 2007 To fulfil the detailed requirements of the ILC, each device from the particle source has to be controlled with high precision, stability and reproducibility. At Warsaw, Poland, a team of engineers works closely with particle physicists on electronics and photonics to develop electronic systems, instrumentation and microprocessors for cavity RF controls at the highest performance and for the lowest cost. This group motivates and encourages young researchers to join them by organising regular symposiums. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

Annual ILC software workshop reviews whole chain of data analysis

| 10 May 2007 Even the best detector will be useless without clever reconstruction algorithms and software. On 2-4 May 2007, the ILC Software Workshop was held at LAL, Orsay (France). The whole chain of data processing was reviewed there: software framework and tools, algorithms and physics results. At the end of the workshop, DESY physicist Ties Behnke summarised that significant progress has been achieved over the past year and important performance milestones are close to being reached, even though the community is still small. Cambridge physicist Mark Thomson, finished his contribution declaring he was now convinced that Particle Flow Algorithm (PFA) can meet the ILC performance goals at 500 GeV and 1 TeV. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

Hot out of the oven, Saclay team improves cavity baking process

| 5 April 2007 Before accelerating electrons and positrons, cavities need to undergo a number of treatments, such as chemical and electropolishing, the last one being baking. The standard baking procedure heats the cavity at 120°C for two days with an ultra high vacuum (UHV) requirement. These very restrictive conditions are unfortunately not appropriate for the treatment of 16,000 cavities that the ILC requires. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Above 42 MV/m for a single cell cavity electropolished at Saclay

| 15 March 2007 Last January, engineers from the DAPNIA laboratory in Saclay France qualified a new electropolishing facility for single cell cavities. Their first electropolished cavity reaches a promising result, above 42 MV/m (megavolts per metre) of accelerating gradient. It allows them to join the global R&D effort on these cavity treatments. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

International Review Panel Looks at ILC Detectors

| 22 February 2007 The experiments will be the centre piece of the future ILC, and all the physics will revolve around them. They are being developed by sub-detector R&D and test-beam studies. The Worldwide Study (WWS) formed the Detector R&D Panel, headed by Chris Damerell, to review the activities and list missing topics. The panel has now started to hold regular reviews of the R&D projects. A dedicated committee will be formed for each sub-detector review, including external consultants, local experts, regional representatives and members of the panel. During the last ILC meeting in Beijing in February 2007, it reviewed the detector tracking systems. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

The ILC Vertex Detector: Tagging Transient Particles

| 1 February 2007 At the heart of the massive ILC detector system, the vertex detector, a compact tracking device about the size of a wine bottle, surrounds the interaction region. This high-tech piece of equipment hosts about a billion pixels in total - equivalent to hundreds of the finest cameras. It works just like a 3-D camera because it measures the tracks of outgoing particles with micron precision. "Building and designing a vertex detector for the ILC is a real challenge," said Marc Winter, a physicist leading a micro-electronics group in IPHC, an IN2P3 Laboratory in Strasbourg, France. "This detector will reach fantastic performances, well beyond what was ever achieved so far." Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

Experience the ILC Grid Virtual Organisation

| 11 January 2007 Ever dreamt of saving computing time? "With the ILC Grid Virtual Organisation, I do in one day what I would do in about 100 days with my personal computer," said Olivier Dadoun, a post-doc at LAL, France. Category: Feature | Tagged: