Barry Barish | 15 November 2007Beijing is a place to mark important ILC milestones. In 2004, the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) announced the decision to base the ILC acceleration technology on superconducting radiofrequency technology. In February 2007, we released the draft Global Design Effort Reference Design Report (RDR) for the ILC. This past week, in what I anticipate will mark an equally important milestone for the ILC, many of us attended the CCAST ILC Accelerator Workshop and first Asia ILC R&D Seminar under the JSPS Core-University Program.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: Beijing, CCAST, China
Barry Barish | 1 November 2007Last week was an eventful week. The ALCPG07 and GDE meetings at Fermilab, attended by over 300 scientists and engineers, marked the completion of the ILC Reference Design Report and the beginning of the engineering design activities. The joint plenary session on the first day of the meeting featured a presentation (video and slides) by Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy. He made a number of key points. He noted the importance of our recently released RDR in planning the future course of the ILC. He commented on the need to formalise the international ILC partnerships between interested governments. He issued a directive to proceed with the US funded ILC R&D through the DOE Critical Decision process. He stated the need for the Global Design Effort to take into account the constraints of obtaining government funding in our schedules for the ILC.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: critical decision process, DOE, DOE order 413.3, United States
Nick Walker | 25 October 2007I am currently waiting to get on a plane to fly to the Fermilab Global Design Effort meeting, where we will finally say goodbye to the Reference Design phase, and formally begin the new Engineering Design (ED) phase for the ILC.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: GDE Project Managers, project managers
Barry Barish | 20 September 2007These days it seems that the questions I am asked most frequently are not about what gradient we will achieve for the ILC, not who will be the ILC Research Director, the next SLAC Director or the CERN Director General. Instead, I receive both genuine and rhetorical questions about Fermilab's proposed Project X.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: Fermilab, Project X, United States
Barry Barish | 13 September 2007In order to have the strength and organisation we need to carry out an ILC engineering design over the next three years, the GDE Executive Committee has been carefully considering how to reorganise our efforts following completion of the Reference Design Report.
Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: engineering design
