Barry Barish and Lyn Evans | 21 February 2013Today represents a crossroads in the global efforts towards a linear collider. We are officially making the transition from the International Linear Collider Steering Committee and Global Design Efforts to the new Linear Collider Board and Linear Collider Collaboration that will coordinate the next phase of the global R&D towards a high-energy electron-positron collider to complement the LHC. GDE Director Barry Barish and LCC Director Lyn Evans share their vision in a joint Director’s Corner.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, GDE, ILC, Linear Collider Collaboration, Technical Design Report
Barry Barish | 7 February 2013The draft of the ILC Technical Design Report (TDR) was completed last November and submitted for review. On 13 and 14 December, the TDR underwent a technical review at KEK by an augmented ILCSC Program Advisory Committee. The review report endorses the technical design we have presented and recommends “no changes in the TDR.” The report does identify areas and items to address in the future.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ATF2, cost review, detector R&D, PAC, review, Technical Design Report
Barry Barish | 10 January 2013Last year was an especially exciting year for particle physics with the discovery of a 126-GeV particle that appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson. This event is likely to be the most important discovery in decades: the observation of a new kind of particle that signals the mechanism for creating mass in the universe. These impressive early results already point to future directions for the LHC, and more broadly for particle physics. In fact, closer to home, this discovery is providing strong motivation for a Japanese initiative for a staged approach to the ILC, beginning with a ~250 GeV Higgs factory, with the capability of increasing the energy in the longer term.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cost review, Higgs, Higgs factory, SB2009, Technical Design Report
Barry Barish | 20 December 2012One of the key objectives of the ILC R&D programme during the Technical Design Phase has been to characterise electron cloud effects in an ILC-like low-emittance positron damping ring and to test proposed mitigation techniques. The centerpiece of our efforts has been the CesrTA programme that involved reconfiguring it as an ILC-like low emittance ring and instrumenting it to carry out these studies. CesrTA has been a highly successful experimental programme, leading to reliable mitigation strategies for the ILC positron damping rings.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CesrTA, Cornell University, damping ring, electron cloud
Steinar Stapnes | 6 December 2012It is reporting season: the ILC community is producing the Technical Design Report that also includes the Detector Baseline Design reports, and the CLIC collaboration with associated Detector and Physics studies group have been hard at work completing the CLIC Conceptual Design Report (CDR). The documentation probably surpasses by a large amount - in scope, details and volume - what is normally called a CDR for a project, but then again, there is a lot of work to report on.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: accelerator R&D, CLIC, Conceptual Design Report, detector R&D
Barry Barish | 21 November 2012One of the most important goals of the Global Design Effort has been to demonstrate that high-gradient cavities can be reliably produced in industry. We established two gradient goals: to produce cavities qualified at 35 Megavolts per metre (MV/m) in vertical tests and to demonstrate that an average gradient of 31.5 MV/m is achievable for ILC cryomodules. Furthermore, we set a goal of producing these high-gradient cavities in industry with 50% yield by 2010 and 90% yield by the end of 2012. We have recently achieved these ambitious goals!
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: accelerator R&D, cavity gradient, superconducting cavity, TDR
Barry Barish | 8 November 2012The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) held a “Special Linear Collider Event” as part of their 2012 Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference at Anaheim, California. The special event, held on 29 and 30 October, came on the heels of the discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the LHC at CERN this summer and included an array of leaders in the field. There were presentations on the International Linear Collider (ILC) and Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) accelerators as well as detector concepts, the potential impact of the LC technologies for industrial applications and a forum discussion about future LC perspectives.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, IEEE, ILC, industry, Linear Collider
Barry Barish | 1 November 2012For several years, 2012 has been anticipated as the time when progress in the field of high energy physics would enable us to clarify the priorities for future planning. The interesting LCWS12 workshop at the University of Texas brought together the elements for such planning, if not a plan. There were reports on the discovery of the Higgs-like particle at the LHC and how that might be pursued in a linear collider; there were reports on the future planning processes that are underway in Europe, Japan and the U.S. and there were reports on the progress in developing the ILC Technical Design and CLIC Conceptual Design as well as how a staged approach might be responsive to the LHC discovery.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, ILC, LCWS12, organisation, Technical Design Report
Toshiaki Tauchi | 25 October 2012KEK's Accelerator Test facility (ATF) is up again after its summer shutdown. After several improvements to beams size monitors, multi-ole magnets and the organisation structure, the international team is looking forward to squeezing the beam size further and further towards the 37 nanometres required for the ILC.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ATF2, beam monitor, beam size, magnet
