CesrTA kick-off meeting marks the beginning of the damping ring test programme
There may not have been a ribbon-cutting ceremony or speeches by heads of state. But the official kick-off of Cornell University’s CESR storage ring as ILC damping ring test facility pleased the nearly 40 participants at this week’s “Joint CesrTA Kickoff Meeting and ILC Damping Rings R&D Workshop (ILCDR08)” enormously. “CesrTA will give us a […]
Today's issue features a story from Tohru Takahashi, a particle physicist and associate professor at Hiroshima University. He is the co-author of "Big-Bang wo tsukuridase" (Making the Big-Bang), a book about the ILC.
The PosiPol2008 workshop was held from 16 to 18 June in Hiroshima, Japan. An unfamiliar word, “PosiPol” stands for “polarised positrons”, meaning that the “spins” of positrons are aligned when they meet electrons at the centre of a linear collider. The electron beam is designed to be polarised at the ILC, but according to the […]
Today's issue features a story from Keisuku Fujii, a particle physicist, who is a member of the ILC group in KEK.
On May 31 we had a meeting of our ILC physics subgroup, which is a mixture of experimentalists and theorists working in Japan. The meeting was the fifth in a series that started about a year ago, and each time 20 to 30 people got together to monitor and discuss the direction of the subgroup’s […]
When Fermilab reached out to neighbors five years ago to engage community members in laboratory decision making, some people in science and some neighbors doubted it would work. But last week when the second of two task forces presented its recommendations, both sides said the partnership was invaluable and they would do it again. “It […]
Particle physicists have the reputation that they need to smash things up in order to find out what they are about. Sometimes accelerator physicists get to smash stuff up, too: a group of engineers and technicians recently crash-tested a full cryomodule. They wanted to find out what the 12-metre piece of kit would look like […]
Controlling beam tests all over the world
Even if you don’t want to step through new control room’s swish sliding doors, you can have a look inside DESY’s new feature because of its doors made of glass: it is a medium-sized room with some technical interior and an ILC colour scheme. There are two computer working stations, each with four monitors and […]
The University of Chicago announced today that it has received a $5 million gift to be directed toward the development of future programs in particle physics. “This is a marvelous gift,” said Robert Zimmer, President of the University. “A generous family has stepped forward and is making an investment in high-energy physics, to the direct […]
Members of the latest group exploring the proposed International Linear Collider lack physics degrees. In fact, they don’t yet have high school diplomas. To teach 35 eighth-graders about particle physics, Batavia Rotolo Middle School teachers Macy Felter and Elizabeth Selander had them study the ILC, the proposed next-generation particle accelerator. “We’ve never tried anything like […]
Accelerators have featured in some movies, Terminator 3, for example. But people outside of the physics world did not notice much. In this summer, cult director Takashi Miike will make the accelerator quite visible in his newest film “Kamisama no Puzzle” (God’s Puzzle). Miike, who allegedly influenced Quentin Tarantino, is best known for his grotesque […]
Polarisation and polarimetry experts meet for the first time
Theorists and experimentalists aren’t always of the same opinion. There is one thing on which opinions aren’t polarised though, and that is polarisation. Polarisation is a special characteristic of a particle bunch – a sort of measure of the particles’ combined spin – that, when studied in the right sort of detector at the ILC, […]