Barry Barish | 10 June 2010[...] Today, I will report on the latest meeting of the Project Advisory Committee (PAC) that reviews both the accelerator and detector technical efforts and reports to the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC). This recent meeting was particularly important, because at this time we are dealing with differing opinions regarding the proposed baseline changes for the ILC technical design.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: general issues group, PAC review, review, Valencia
Barry Barish | 3 June 2010[...] I was pleased that the 2010 National Science Board's Public Service Award was given to the "Expanding Your Horizons Network," an organisation that is dedicated to educating young school girls about careers in math, science and engineering. I was doubly pleased that one of our own ILC Global Design Effort members, Cherrill Spencer, who has served the network for so many years, was part of the team that came to Washington DC to receive this award. -- Barry Barish
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: award, Expanding Your Horizons Network, women in science
Barry Barish | 27 May 2010[...] The first BAW will be held at KEK from 7-10 September 2010, and the second at SLAC from 18-21 January 2011. I am very much encouraging active participation from the detector community and by some of our advisory committee members both in the preparations leading up to these workshops and at the workshops, themselves.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: baseline assessment workshop, BAW, RDR, TDR
Barry Barish | 20 May 2010The most recent meeting of the ILCSC, chaired by Jon Bagger, was held on 25 February 2010 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a day before the meeting of ICFA. This meant that many of the major laboratory directors could take part in the ILCSC meeting, and since much of the ILC R&D programme is carried out through these laboratories, this meeting presented the opportunity to have meaningful and frank discussions of the support and resources needed to achieve the high-priority ILC R&D goals, both for the ILC accelerator and detector efforts.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: Brookhaven, ICFA, ILC R&D, ILCSC, R&D programme
Barry Barish | 13 May 2010The cost of the project "next-generation linear collider" ILC has been a major issue, ever since we began our ILC design work in 2005. The scale of the project and the costs of the ILC are roughly equivalent to the largest present-day science projects, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The good news is that we believe the ILC will not cost more than these megascience projects, and they have actually been built or are being built. The bad news is that the present world economic situation and government priorities are such that it will be extremely difficult to convince governments to make yet another large investment in a fundamental science project of such a large scale. Nevertheless, fundamental science must go on...
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cost breakdown, cost estimate, ITER, LHC, Reference Design Report, SB2009
Barry Barish | 6 May 2010[...] The trend towards larger science seems inevitable and we scientists need to make sure such facilities are done cost effectively, if we expect society to support us. This means we must very carefully choose which projects to develop, so that we will produce the best science.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: cost, cost estimate, cost growth, ITER, NASA
Toshiaki Tauchi | 29 April 2010The ATF2 collaboration has recently succeeded to obtain vertical beam size of less than one micrometre and consequently has now entered into the nanometre world in the final focus system. In this corner, I will describe what is AFT2 and how we reached this challenging beam size. -- Toshiaki Tauchi
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ATF2, focus system, MDI
Barry Barish | 22 April 2010At the Beijing meeting, Philippe Lebrun gave a report to the Global Design Effort Executive Committee of the initial work of the new "ILC-CLIC general issues group." [...] The group has reviewed its mandate, surveyed the progress of the joint ILC-CLIC working groups and planned its future activities. -- Barry Barish
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ILC-CLIC collaboration
Barry Barish | 15 April 2010One of the primary missions of the ILC Global Design Effort is to help in the training of the next generation of accelerator physicists. To achieve that end, we have been a sponsor and we supplied many of the lecturers at a series of schools that began four years ago. [...] This year's school will focus on subjects in accelerator physics related to TeV-scale linear colliders, including the ILC, CLIC and the muon collider. -- Barry Barish
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: LC accelerator school, LC2010
Barry Barish | 8 April 2010This past week marked the beginning of a new era for particle physics with the much publicised achievement of establishing the first 7-TeV collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). [...] We should soon begin to have a glimpse of Terascale physics from searches for the origin of mass to looking for evidence of a new symmetry in nature that could even explain the dark matter. Even more intriguing is the real possibility for totally unexpected surprises that are awaiting us. We are looking to LHC science to establish what kind of lepton collider will be needed to best exploit the energy frontier in the longer term.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: 7 TeV, CERN, ILC, lepton collider, LHC, supersymmetry, terascale
