As is well known, the International Linear Collider (ILC) is being discussed as an International project, which means many countries around the world would contribute human, technical, and financial resources to the project. This is clearly a very complicated proposition and it takes effort from many directions to keep it moving. Recently, three Diet Members […]
Towards an Asian Strategy for Particle Physics?
I may have been in the accelerator business in general and the linear collider business in particular for a very long time, but there are still things I have not understood properly – particularly on the political side. Last week I was invited to give a talk about the “ILC Technical Status” to the Asian […]
Political progress
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies – Groucho Marx Notwithstanding Groucho Marx’s somewhat idiosyncratic sentiments concerning the profession of politics, a project as large as the ILC will inevitably create a political test that will be every bit as challenging as the […]
The Golden State of Linear Colliders
California, officially known as the “Golden State”, has recently been the scene of two key meetings of the wider linear-collider community. The first, from 1 to 4 December at SLAC National Laboratory, was the latest in the long-standing series of meetings of the Tesla Technology Collaboration (TTC), which explores the latest developments in the superconducting […]
LHC Run-2 results to point the way
Time passes, it seems, increasingly quickly and it’s now more than a month since the international Linear Collider Workshop, LCWS2015, took place in Whistler, British Columbia. This marked the latest milestone in our global community’s preparations for a next-generation high-energy linear electron-positron collider to explore (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld) the ‘known knowns’, namely the physics […]
Trailguides in difficult terrain: the Physics and Detector Advisory Panel (PDAP)
The Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC) was established in February 2013, and the organisation of the physics and detector part started to form over the following several months with regional representatives, concept group representatives, and working groups. One important ingredient for the organisation was the physics and detector advisory panel (PDAP) that advises the Associate Director […]
Collider facts
In Whistler, British Columbia, some two hundred physicists gathered to the annual Linear Collider Workshop. As the last speaker of the meeting, I tried to summarise the status of various collider options currently under discussion. In particular, I tried to clarify their readiness and timelines. The ILC passed the TDR (Technical Design Report) stage back […]
Future colliders
This LC newsline is a rather personal one for me and inspired by my experiences over the last decade and especially the last year or so. I have been and am a member of the Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC), have worked on ILC for the last ten years, have contributed to the CLIC Physics & […]
Elementary – an award for thorough detective work
Last week’s announcement of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics will not only have given great satisfaction to the recipients, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald, but also to their many friends and colleagues both inside and outside the Super Kamiokande (Super-K) and Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) collaborations. Parochially, wearing my Oxford hat, this award also […]
SRF Technology getting ready for the ILC: A Report from Whistler
The Linear Collider Workshop (LCWS2015) will be held, at Whistler, BC, Canada, in November, this year. The 17th International Conference on RF Superconductivity (SRF2015) was held in the same place from 13 to 18, September, just prior to the LCWS. We would thank TRIUMF hosting two major conference/workshop events at the nicest village surrounded by […]