Barbara Warmbein | 6 November 2008More than 1034 times per second per square centimetre — that’s how often electrons and positrons are supposed to collide in the ILC. The project’s accelerator experts have no doubts that it can be done, but they have to demonstrate it, too. An important proof is to run ILC-like beam conditions through a radiofrequency (RF) unit that consists of one klystron and 26 superconducting cavities housed in three cryomodules. Running ILC-like beam conditions means running the cavities at their gradient limits and with 800-microsecond beam pulses with an average current of about nine milliamperes (or mA). The FLASH accelerator at DESY is capable of approaching these ILC-like beam conditions, but they are at the design limits of the machine and are well beyond typical operating conditions. An international team with members from DESY, FNAL, SLAC, KEK, and Argonne have come together for a series of tests that wants to drive an ILC-like beam through FLASH.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, FLASH
16 October 2008The third SiD Workshop this year, hosted from 17 to 19 September by the University of Colorado at Boulder, marked an important milestone on SiD's way to the Letter of Intent (LOI): the collaboration froze its detector’s global parameters. The meeting was opened by Barry Barish, who reminded everyone that the "science remains the key to ultimate success" of the ILC programme and that detector development was critical. Given the difficult times for ILC funding both for accelerators and detectors, the meeting included updates on the current funding situation worldwide and on the status in France, Japan, the UK and the US. SiD additionally invited two guest speakers, Howard Nicholson from the US Department of Energy Office of High Energy Physics and Marvin Goldberg from the National Science Foundation, to give the audience an update of the US situation and the view from Washington.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: SiD, SiD parameters
Rika Takahashi | 9 October 2008This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to a Japanese-born American and two Japanese particle physicists: Yoichiro Nambu, professor emeritus at University of Chicago, for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, Makoto Kobayashi, professor emeritus at KEK and executive director of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and Toshihide Maskawa, professor at Kyoto Sangyo University in Kyoto, for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, Nobel prize
Barbara Warmbein | 2 October 2008The scientists working on the International Large Detector concept ILD had met for the second time this year to discuss the set-up of their future masterpiece. The ILD group formed about a year ago from the former GLD and LDC detector concept groups. Both concepts had their plans for trackers, calorimeters and the detector set-up as a whole.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: ILD
Barbara Warmbein | 4 September 2008There are many official stages to a project financed by the European Commission – from call, proposal, negotiations, contract draft, start of work, annual reports to one of the most official events: the kick-off meeting. Europe's new flagship project on cavity production and exploration of international governance structures, ILC-HiGrade took this step last week. Representatives form all eight work packages were at DESY to present their objectives, their to-do lists and the milestones already achieved.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, Europe, ILC HiGrade
Barbara Warmbein | 14 August 2008Good news from an experimental hall at the edge of the prairie: Fermilab's ILC test area in the 'New Muon Lab' (NML) has just taken a major step towards completion with the installation of the first cryomodule on 6 August.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cryomodule, Fermilab, NML
7 August 2008The Linear Collider Forum of America (LCFOA) held an ILC industrialisation meeting and briefing for Congressional staffers on Capitol Hill on 29 July. The briefing was attended by 46 persons from universities, industry, and laboratories and Congressional staff. About half of the attendees were Congressional staffers. The objective of the briefing was to emphasise the importance of a strong industrialisation component within the Americas Regional Team's Technical Design effort, describe other potential benefits of the ILC technologies for industry and the country, and to recommend the economic and educational benefits of siting the ILC at a U.S. site during the Technical Design phase timeframe to the U.S. audience.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: industrialisation, LCFOA, Linear Collider Forum of America, United States
Rika Takahashi | 7 August 2008A day before Japanese cabinet reshuffling, Diet members and other senior government officials took time out from their busy schedule to attend the inaugural meeting of newly formed "Federation of Diet members to promote the realisation of ILC" with a group with representatives from all political parties in Japan: Liberal Democratic party (LDP), Democratic party of Japan (DPJ), New Komeito (NK), Social Democratic Party (SDP), The People's New Party (PNP), and Japanese Communist Party (JCP). The federation's letter of intent describes its aim the promotion of the ILC project recognising that particle physics, as a research field with no ethnical, national or ideological borders, is the essential part of the nation's basic science research strategy.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Federation of Diet members, Japan
Barbara Warmbein | 31 July 2008In their meeting a couple of days ago at DESY, ECFA, the European Committee for Future Accelerators, got a complete update on all present and future particle physics activities in Europe. They also discussed the ILC and its potential: “We think it is important to remember that particle physics in Europe is more than the LHC,” says the current ECFA chair Karlheinz Meier from Heidelberg university in Germany. “The community has to plan now, gather facts and lay foundations for future projects, and the ILC is a very good example for this.”
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY, ECFA
24 July 2008Unusually for the holiday season, the car parks are full, finding a table at lunch is a formidable challenge, and people can (more than ever) be found in their offices late into the night. All the evidence points to one thing… the most ambitious particle collider in the world is just a few weeks away from its first proton beam!
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CERN, LHC
