20 December 2012Tokyo, 15 December. The draft of the Technical Design Report (TDR) for the planned International Linear Collider ILC was handed over to Jonathan Bagger, the chair of the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC), at an official ceremony in Tokyo, Japan, on 15 December. This draft is the product of many years of research and development and a series of in-depth technical reviews for the ILC, the potential next-generation particle collider to complement and advance beyond the physics of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The handing over of the TDR draft marks the ILC's major step towards the completion of its final design.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILCSC, Japan, milestone, TDR
Barbara Warmbein | 21 November 2012An industrial study commissioned by the Global Design Effort in collaboration with experts from CERN gives a clearer picture of how cryomodules for the ILC could be mass-produced by industry. The study, whose results were recently presented at a meeting between accelerator experts from different labs. A similar study has looked at cavity serial production. One of the scientists leading the cryomodule study, Vittorio Parma from CERN, was the driving force behind the cryostat assembly for 2000 cryomagnets for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider between 2003 and 2008 and thus predestined to lend his experience to the project.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CEA Saclay, CERN, cryomodule, European XFEL, industrialisation, serial production
21 November 2012Pier Oddone reports from the latest meeting of FALC at Fermilab. "It is a particularly interesting time for this organization with the discovery at CERN of a Higgs-like particle and the statements by the Japanese high-energy physics community of their strong desire to host the International Linear Collider in Japan. While the Japanese government has not issued a formal statement inviting the world to help Japan build this global facility, the ILC clearly enjoys strong political support in Japan, where it is part of a broader effort to create a new global city. It is natural in the interim for our Japanese colleagues to seek support from the rest of the world, which would help convince their government to go ahead with such a project."
Category: Feature | Tagged: FALC
8 November 2012According to the Standard Model, the mass of the Higgs boson should be enormous. But recent experimental results suggest it’s quite small, indicating that scientists might need to go beyond the Standard Model to explain the new particle.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Higgs, Higgs boson
8 November 2012The original CERN convention, which was drafted nearly 60 years ago, foresaw that the organization should have a role as co-ordinator for European particle physics, as well as operating international accelerator laboratories. Today, this role is more appropriate than ever: the long lead times usually required to prepare and construct facilities and experiments for modern high-energy physics, together with the increased costs for these activities, underlie the need for a general European strategy in the field. So it was natural for CERN Council to initiate the creation of a European Strategy for Particle Physics in June 2005 and to establish dedicated groups for reviewing the scientific status and producing a proposal. They consulted widely with the community, funding agencies and policy makers in preparing the strategy document, which was adopted by Council in July 2006 during a dedicated session in Lisbon.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, European Strategy for Particle Physics
25 October 2012CERN's newsletter, the CERN Bulletn, reports on progress from CLIC: In early October, the CLIC collaboration published its final Conceptual Design Report. Accompanying it was a strategic summary document that describes a whole new approach to the project: developing the linear e+e− collider in three energy stages. Though CLIC’s future still depends on signs from the LHC, its new staged approach to high-energy electron-positron physics for the post-LHC era is nothing short of convincing.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CLIC
Barbara Warmbein | 27 September 2012Some 500 particle physicists from Europe and beyond met in Cracow, Poland, in September to kick-start the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, an initiative by the CERN Council that sets the European pace for global planning and cooperation on future projects in particle physics around the world. With the recent discovery of the Higgs-like particle at the LHC, a Higgs factory is high up on the wish list.
Category: Feature | Tagged: European Strategy for Particle Physics, Higgs factory, Japan, staged approach
Barbara Warmbein | 13 September 2012A team at DESY has created a complete virtual-reality three-dimensional ILC. They have combined information from various computer-aided design systems and about all areas of the ILC together in one model that you can now walk through. This model can highlight problems before they become costly and is a great motivator for the owners of the individual systems.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 3D model, damping ring, DESY, detector hall, ILD, linac, positron source, Virtual reality
6 September 2012A recent workshop reviewed the latest experiences with the phenomenon of electron clouds at the LHC and other accelerators. Electron clouds – abundantly generated in accelerator vacuum chambers by residual-gas ionization, photoemission and secondary emission – can affect the operation and performance of hadron and lepton accelerators in a variety of ways. They can induce increases in vacuum pressure, beam instabilities, beam losses, emittance growth, reductions in the beam lifetime or additional heat loads on a (cold) chamber wall.
Category: Feature | Tagged: beam emittance, CesrTA, damping ring, electron cloud
Qian Pan | 2 August 2012A group of Chinese scientists, headed by Xuejun Jia from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently finished the design of the remote handling of the ILC positron target. The target forms part of the positron source and is the place where positrons are produced and then accelerated before they collide with their antiparticles, the electrons.
Category: Feature | Tagged: China, positron source, positron target, remote handling
