Barry Barish | 10 November 2011An experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, designed to study the oscillation properties of neutrinos in travelling 732 kilometres from CERN to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, reported evidence that these neutrinos arrive sooner than expected for particles travelling at the speed of light. Although the reported deviation is quite small, if correct, it would violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. The physics community now has to check whether the evidence is correct.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: MINOS, neutrinos, OPERA, scientific method, speed of light
Barry Barish | 3 November 2011The first joint ILC/CLIC workshop was held last year in Geneva. It was an important step towards bringing these two R&D and design efforts closer together. This year we held a second joint workshop in Granada, Spain, and the muon collider effort also participated. One of the primary aims of the CLIC and ILC collaborations is to work more collaboratively on joint problems, and another is to join together behind a single project by the time we propose to build a linear collider. Last week in this column Mike Harrison gave his observations of the Granada meeting that he characterised as ‘from the back of the room’, and today I add mine ‘from the front row.’
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: future, LCWS11
Mike Harrison | 27 October 2011Superconducting radiofrequency technology is advancing, the ILC design is coming together, and the LHC programme is running exceptionally well, although the evidence for new physics remains tantalizing. The linear collider community is well on its way to bringing the next big particle collider to the world's stage.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: LCWS11, LHC, Superconducting RF
Barry Barish | 20 October 2011The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science has made a new five-year award for ILC detector R&D. A kickoff meeting was held at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan in September. The new award will support critical R&D on advanced particle detector techniques that are both central to ILC needs and have broader implications for science, technology and medicine.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: detector R&D, Japan
Barry Barish | 13 October 2011In anticipation of completing the Global Design Effort’s final deliverable, the Technical Design Report, by the end of 2012, serious discussions are underway as to the next steps and what will follow. The International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC) is taking primary responsibility for creating a plan. As part of the process, the GDE Executive Committee submitted a position paper to ILCSC for its meeting in Mumbai, India in August. I share our input with our readers today.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: future, GDE, ILCSC, TDR
Barry Barish | 6 October 2011The LHC is now operating successfully at 3.5 TeV in a physics data-taking mode, and a significant amount of data has already been recorded, analysed and reported. The early results are already narrowing the available mass range for the Higgs boson and are setting limits on supersymmetric particles. Significant results can be expected from this data run, which is currently scheduled to last until the end of 2012.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CERN, LHC
Kaoru Yokoya | 29 September 2011This week, linear collider scientists converge on Granada, Spain for the second International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders. While at LCWS11, the GDE members are busy planning the final details for the Technical Design Report.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: GDE, TDR
Barry Barish | 22 September 2011Now that the baseline for the Technical Design Report has been established, the focus is on fleshing out the details of that design and optimising it for cost, risk and performance. As a result, the costing process is being initiated. The first meeting to begin the costing effort was held at Caltech in the US, immediately following the face-to-face Executive Committee meeting in July.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cost estimate, cost optimisation, RDR, TDR, Technical Design Report, value management
Barry Barish | 15 September 2011The American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields meeting at Brown University had a broad programme covering new results, special topics such as celebrating the Tevatron and plans for future projects. In my concluding remarks for the conference, I gave a personal view of future opportunities in particle physics.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: DPF, future, future accelerators, particle physics
