Barry Barish | 12 June 2008On Thursday, 29 May, the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel held its spring meeting in Washington, DC. The entire meeting was devoted to the presentation and discussion of the anxiously awaited report "US Particle Physics: Scientific Opportunities: A Strategic Plan for the Next Ten Years," by the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: HEPAP, P5 panel, P5 report, United States
Barry Barish | 5 June 2008Last week we reported on the beginning of our important experimental programme on electron cloud effects, using the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) accelerator at Cornell University. This is one of our highest-priority R&D goals during the ILC Technical Design Phase 1 (TDP-1) and is aimed at understanding the magnitude of the problem for the ILC positron damping rings and the effectiveness of our proposed mitigation techniques.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: CesrTA, Cornell University, damping ring, electron cloud, TDP-1, Technical Design Phase
Barry Barish | 22 May 2008The ILC Global Design Effort is made up primarily of in-kind R&D contributions done in the partner countries, mostly at the large laboratories that are developing the technologies and design towards a real ILC machine. Our primary mission in the GDE is to coordinate and guide this programme.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: FALC, GDE common fund
Barry Barish | 8 May 2008Recruiting and training the next generation of accelerator physicists is crucial to the future of the field. Accelerator schools play a central role in introducing potential accelerator experts to the science and in providing advanced education.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: LC school, linear collider school, United States
Barry Barish | 1 May 2008One of the more difficult problems in conducting large-scale science projects is the process of decision making. The ability to make good decisions in a timely way can be an enormous challenge and can differentiate good management from not-so-good management.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: KEK, STF, STF-2
Nick Walker | 24 April 2008What is your science worth? A question I have recently heard raised during many over-coffee discussions. The question is of course rhetorical: none of us can really answer it. But the fact that it is being asked at all is part of a reaction to the GDE management's policy to make the cost of the project a central focus of the Technical Design Phase.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: TDP, Technical Design Phase
