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
Barbara Warmbein | 31 May 2007In a packed auditorium many of world's leading high-energy physics brains celebrated ‘one of the sculptors of the physics of the ILC which wouldn’t be doable without him’, said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, DESY, and ‘not just a colleague, more of a friend’, said Siegfried Bethke, Max Planck Institute for Physics. Last Tuesday, a day before the start of the ILC / LCWS 07 symposium, they had gathered for a colloquium in honour of theorist Peter Zerwas, who is retiring at the age of 65, ‘after more than 250 publications, 12000 citations and certainly many more to come’, said Albrecht Wagner, DESY Director-General.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: DESY
Barbara Warmbein | 17 May 2007All German universities and research institutes involved in the LHC and ILC have just pocketed 25 million Euros – and the prospect of a bright future at the Terascale. A DESY-driven funding proposal for the project ‘Helmholtz Alliance: Physics at the Terascale’ was approved by the senate of the Helmholtz Association on Tuesday this week. It bundles resources and expertise in German particle physics to allow scientists to play leading roles in particular in the LHC– and of course also the ILC.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: German Helmholtz Alliance, Germany, Terascale Alliance
3 May 2007In the development of superconducting cavities for the ILC, the machine planning group (MPL) lands another success. New prototypes manufactured from a so-called niobium single crystal plate yield excellent results. The advantage of single-crystal cavities compared with standard ones made of polycrystalline niobium lies in the atomic structure of the crystal lattice.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: cavity, single-crystal niobium
Barbara Warmbein | 26 April 2007Interactions members now officially classify as a tribe: flocking round the warming fire against the Californian chill they shared a goat during their meeting at SLAC last week. But though food may be memorable during the meetings of the InterAction collaboration, discussions and strategic plans are even more important for the communication representatives of particle physics labs, universities and projects. LHC start-up, the future of ILC communication and the meaning of blogs were just a few of the topics on the agenda of the three-day meeting that brought together 16 core and about 10 extended members of the InterAction family. They welcomed two new faces: Rika Takahashi, who has just taken up her job as ILC communicator for Asia at KEK, and Romeo Bassoli from INFN.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: InterAction Collaboration, SLAC
Barbara Warmbein | 19 April 2007Not many people see an immediate connection between exploring the origins of the Universe and finding cancer cells. Nicola d'Ascenzo and his colleagues sure do. In their work to test photo sensors as potential candidates for an ILC hadronic calorimeter they have come across a sensor that could be extremely interesting for positron emission tomography or PET, an imaging techniques that identifies cancerous cells in a body by detecting emitted gamma rays.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: CALICE, DESY, detector R&D, MPPC, SiPM
12 April 2007Starting on 16 April, Rika Takahashi will join KEK's Linear Collider Project Office to serve as the dedicated Asian communicator for the ILC. She is taking over for Youhei Morita, who has served as the ILC communicator for Asia since August 2005. Takahashi will closely collaborate with the other ILC communicators, Elizabeth Clements (Americas), Perrine Royole-Degieux (Europe), and Barbara Warmbein (Europe).
Category: Around the World | Tagged: ILC Communicators
Barbara Warmbein | 22 March 2007Not all vibrations are good. With their 600 nanometres in width and only 6 nanometres in height, the ILC's particle beams could easily be veered off course if parts in the accelerating modules, for example the final focus quadrupole, moved by only a few nanometers. Monitoring and feedback systems will make sure that this doesn't happen, but it's even better to identify weak - moving - points and eliminate them from the very beginning.
Category: Around the World | Tagged: accelerator R&D, EUROTeV, geophone, seismometer, vibrations
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 22 February 2007The 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: R&D panel, review, WWS
8 February 2007More than two hundred scientists and engineers travelled around the globe this past week to attend the 2007 Beijing ILC Workshop at IHEP. The meeting kicked off with GDE Director Barry Barish releasing the draft Reference Design Report and preliminary cost estimate to the meeting attendees. With the publication of the reference design, scientists and engineers welcomed the start of the next phase of the ILC project
Category: Around the World, Slideshow | Tagged: LCWS07, photo album
