Leah Hesla | 8 December 2011A new version of linear collider data storage software was released this past autumn to accommodate detector scientists' increasing sophistication in simulating particle events. LCIO (the name comes from 'linear collider input/output') continues to facilitate agreement among the world's linear collider groups with a common event data model and file format for data exchange.
Category: Feature | Tagged: detector R&D, LCIO, particle simulation, software
Barbara Warmbein | 1 December 2011In a nationwide “Weltmaschine day” to celebrate the second anniversary of collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, universities and institutes all over Germany not only presented the latest results from the LHC to crowded lecture halls, but also showed the fun side of physics in slams and exhibits. A slam about the ILC came first at DESY in Hamburg.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, LHC, science slam, Weltmaschine
Barbara Warmbein | 23 November 2011One of the busiest places in the ILC design is the central region. It’s where it all happens: the beams get squeezed and focused and kicked into collision and out comes physics. To make sure that everything works to perfection and to reach consensus on the design, the central region has just undergone a technical baseline review, along with areas like the connection between damping ring and main linac. One of the core decisions for the latter: a two-stage bunch compressor for shorter beams.
Category: Feature | Tagged: baseline technical review, btr, bunch compressor, cost savings, TDR, Technical Design Report, technical review
23 November 2011Almost a year of work, more than 50 meetings and plenty of diplomacy went into calculating the LHC experiments’ first combination of Higgs search results. The study, made public on 18 November, eliminates several hints the individual experiments saw in previous analyses but leaves in play the favored mass range for the Higgs boson, between 114 and 141 GeV. ATLAS and CMS ruled out at a 95 percent confidence level a Higgs boson with a mass between 141 and 476 GeV.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Higgs boson, LHC
10 November 2011The most ambitious future application under study is for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a 500 GeV superconducting linear accelerator. It will require 16 km of superconducting cavities operating at gradients of 31.5 MV/m. Intense research is underway to reach a high yield for high gradients: 30–40 MV/m. New vendors for niobium, for cavities and for associated components are being developed around the world.
Category: Feature | Tagged: SRF technology, superconducting cavity
Rika Takahashi | 10 November 2011Few particles get as much attention today as the theorised Higgs boson, which so far has eluded detection. Whatever the outcome of the Large Hadron Collider's search for it - whether it finds a Higgs particle or not - there is still compelling physics that a future collider should explore.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 500 GeV, Higgs boson
27 October 2011Linear collider detector developers inside and outside CERN are tackling the next generation of detector technology. While their focus has centred on high-energy linear collider detectors, their innovative concepts and designs will be applicable to any future detector.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CLIC, detector R&D
Leah Hesla | 20 October 2011Until the Large Hadron Collider tells scientists where in the energy frontier to dig for new physics, ILC researchers are preparing for eventualities. Should new physics be found to reside in a range higher than the ILC’s current reach, scientists have a energy-boosting plan in their back pocket.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 1 TeV, energy upgrade, TDR
