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
Barry Barish | 18 October 2012The S1-Global experiment was conceived to demonstrate the radiofrequency (RF) operation of an ILC cryomodule with an average accelerating gradient of 31.5 MV/metre. The project to build a segment of a superconducting linac system and test the string of superconducting RF cavities was carried out at KEK through a global collaboration. This experiment provided a significant and successful demonstration of the operation of eight nine-cell superconducting cavities and associated hardware components with components provided from laboratories around the world.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: international collaboration, plug compatibility, S1-global
Barry Barish | 11 October 2012The Technical Design Report will be the culmination and final deliverable for the ILC Global Design Effort. The report will be submitted in near final form to the ILC Program Advisory Committee in November for technical review in December at KEK. The drafting of the report has been under way since last spring. The GDE Executive Committee recently performed a critical review of a second snapshot of the evolving TDR draft.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: executive committee, LCWS, LCWS12, PAC, Technical Design Report
Barry Barish | 4 October 2012The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel met on 27 and 28 August in Rockville, Maryland, US. A central focus of this meeting was the proposed Fermilab Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment. The meeting included presentations on the physics potential, the reconfiguration options in response to Department of Energy guidance, and perspectives from Fermilab, the collaboration and the DOE.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: future, HEPAP, long-baseline, neutrinos, United States
Nick Walker | 27 September 2012GDE Project Manager Nick Walker reports from a focused, positive and lively meeting in Cracow and the impact the discussions can have on the ILC. Would a staged approach - starting at 250 GeV to make the ILC a Higgs factory and ramping up to 500 GeV later - make for a cheaper machine? Where are the potential savings, and how long would it take to build an ILC Higgs factory?
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cost, European Strategy for Particle Physics, Higgs factory, Technical Design Report
Barry Barish | 20 September 2012There are no official proposals for where the ILC could be located. Rather, our approach has been to develop an ILC design compatible with three “sample” sites that have different characteristics. In this process, we have by no means ruled out the possibility of housing the ILC in a shallow site, even though all three of our sample sites are deep underground. A new shallow site possibility has recently been suggested in Hanford, Washington in the US.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cut-and-cover, DOE, ILC site, LIGO, United States
Barry Barish | 13 September 2012SLAC has had a remarkable first 50 years, which were celebrated in a special event this past month. Although the theme of that event focused on the next 50 years, the achievements of the past inform the future plans and prospects. In that regard, the physics achievements of SLAC were duly noted at the event because the American Physical Society named it an APS Historic Site and awarded the lab a plaque.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: anniversary, APS, SLAC, SLC
Barry Barish | 6 September 2012The particle physics communities worldwide are undertaking strategic planning processes that will set out the course of the field for the coming years. Recent science results, such as the discovery of the Higgs-like particle and the measurement of a relatively large value of theta13, open up exciting future possibilities. In Europe, the process of developing an update to the European Strategy for Particle Physics is under way. The next major step will be an open symposium in Krakow, Poland, from 10 to 12 September, for which a set of linear-collider input documents has been submitted.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CLIC, European Strategy for Particle Physics, future, Higgs, ILC
