30 August 2007At Texas A&M University, a team led by Peter McIntyre has developed a new design for superconducting cavities for linear colliders, perhaps even the International Linear Collider. Their polyhedral cavity design, which is only in its beginning stages and requires a significant amount of R&D, could offer such benefits as increasing the accelerating gradient and making the cavities more cost-efficient.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: polyhedral cavity, Texas A&M University, United States
23 August 2007As a virtual collaboration, members of the ILC community took advantage of last week’s Lepton Photon conference and held parallel meetings for the GDE Executive Committee, ILC Steering Committee (ILCSC) and the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA).
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Korea
Rika Takahashi | 2 August 2007Every month, a lot of Asian researchers come to KEK to conduct their research or experiments. “We have had 45 visitors for fiscal year 2007 so far, including ten Korean researchers,” says Tomiko Shirakata, secretary at KEK’s Linear Collider Project Office. Shirkata is in charge of KEK’s visitors programme activities and provides all visitor supports such as arranging logistics, dealing with the consulate service for visa applications, and giving tips on how to spend days off in Japan. KEK launched the visitor programme in April 2006 aiming to facilitate the foreign researchers’ activities in Japan, especially for Asian researchers and students, who may have difficulties to conduct research overseas for some country-specific reasons.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Asia, KEK, Korea
Rika Takahashi | 26 July 2007Men and women wearing gaudy dresses, looking for customers under garish neon signs – this is a common sight in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku, a famous entertainment and red-light district in Tokyo, Japan. Walking down an alleyway that has countless bars and nightclubs, you will see a hand-written sign posted on the billboard of a shabby building that says, “The Accelerator’s Night 3.”
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan, KEK
19 July 2007While other labs concentrate on developing superconducting cavities for the International Linear Collider (ILC), SLAC is focusing on the technology needed to power them. In addition to klystron, modulator and radio frequency (RF) distribution development, this effort includes a coupler program. A coupler is basically a coaxial transmission line that connects normal-conducting, air-filled, room-temperature waveguides to each superconducting, evacuated, super-cold accelerator cavity. The couplers are complex devices due to the various requirements imposed on them; they must convert the RF to a coaxial mode, transmit high power (~300 kW), be mechanically flexible for cool-down of one end to 2K (-271
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cavity coupler, coaxial test stand, SLAC
Elizabeth Clements | 12 July 2007Amidst the corn fields in DeKalb Illinois, 65 miles to the west of Chicago, a group of 22 physicists and students, who are members of the Northern Illinois Center for Accelerator and Detector Development (NICADD) at Northern Illinois University, contribute to the International Linear Collider in more ways than one. From beam dynamics to calorimetry hardware to simulation software, the ILC group at NIU covers it all. Because the group consists of such a large number of undergraduate and graduate students, training the future generation of scientists – who may be running the actual ILC one day – is perhaps one of their largest contributions of all.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: NICADD, NIU, United States
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 5 July 2007To 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: CARE, TTC, Warsaw University
Rika Takahashi | 14 June 2007The particle physics world has long been exchanging researchers internationally. One of the reasons for this active exchange is particle physicists share a common interest in the universal questions: How did the universe begin? What are the origins of mass? In addition, as the scale of accelerator facilities grows larger, it becomes difficult for each country to build and maintain their number of accelerators that are each suited for different purposes. This reality pushes researchers to travel abroad, wherever the accelerators are available.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: FJPPL, Japan
Rika Takahashi | 7 June 2007During the eighth workshop of the “Federation of Diet members to promote the realisation of ILC” held at Nagatacho, Tokyo on 26 April, there was a lecture that provided a good feeling of the “Yara-maika” spirit.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Japan
Barbara Warmbein | 7 June 2007On Tuesday 5 June, the German Federal Minister of Education and Research Annette Schavan officially launched the European X-ray laser facility XFEL. Using essentially the same uperconducting accelerator technology that is planned for the ILC, the 3.4-kilometre XFEL (for X-ray free-electron laser) will produce high-intensity ultra-short X-ray flashes with the properties of laser light. This will open up a whole range of new perspectives for fundamental research and for industrial users.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: Germany, XFEL
