Rika Takahashi | 14 July 2011Worrying about blemishes on the skin is not just an issue for people who pursue personal physical beauty, but also for accelerator scientists. Scientists and engineers at KEK have found a way to deal with unwanted stains on the inner surface of superconducting cavities, which might be one of the causes of performance limitation.
Category: Feature | Tagged: electropolishing, KEK, Kyoto camera, superconducting cavity
7 July 2011I got involved in particle accelerators as a graduate student because I wanted to work in an area that had the potential to have a positive impact on people’s lives in 10 to 20 years. Near the end of my PhD studies, I attended a talk by Herman Winick, who introduced the audience to synchrotron radiation sources and the research going on at the SPEAR ring at what is now the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, SSRL.
Ties Behnke (DESY) and Roman Pöschl (CNRS/LAL) | 30 June 2011With the publication of the Detailed Baseline Design Report in their sights, members of the ILD collaboration work diligently to form realisable models of their detector, ones that take into account both their physics simulations and the nuts and bolts of engineering designs.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DBD, detailed baseline design, ILD, LOI
Leah Hesla | 30 June 2011Learning to stabilise a particle beam of longer pulses such as those needed for the ILC requires diligence, patience and practice. ILC and FLASH scientists share the fruits of all three at the recent workshop on long bunch trains.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 9 mA experiment, accelerator R&D, beam-power, DESY, FLASH
Leah Hesla | 23 June 2011Linear collider collaborators are on board with the use of two platforms to move the ILC’s two colossal detectors in and out of the particle beamline. Now they work to design them so the detectors' rides are as smooth as possible.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CFS, detector R&D, ILD, machine detector interface, SiD
Leah Hesla | 9 June 2011Last month Jefferson Lab, instrumental in developing SCRF technology for the ILC, took a critical step in a five-year upgrade of its CEBAF accelerator. Once complete, the machine will be able to accelerate electron beams to energies of up to 12 GeV, allowing researchers to chart, with ever greater depth and resolution, the map of the nucleon.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CEBAF, Jefferson Lab, JLab
Rika Takahashi | 9 June 2011Janice Nelson and Glen White from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US are the first overseas scientists to visit KEK after the earthquake.
Category: Feature | Tagged: earthquake, KEK, SLAC
Thomas Zoufal (DESY) | 2 June 2011Brian Foster, recently awarded the Humboldt professorship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, has begun work in Germany this week. He hopes to advance particle physics by exploring new methods of acceleration, analysing unique physics data and of course playing his violin.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, Germany, Humboldt Professorship, University of Hamburg
26 May 2011With the LHC up and running, some might imagine physicists just waiting for a Higgs boson to pop up in one of the four experiments, before publishing a paper and moving on to solve science’s next Big Mystery. However this picture is very far from the reality of experimental particle physics today, where results are based on statistics, statistics and yet more statistics.
Category: Feature | Tagged: discoveries, Higgs boson, LHC, particle physics
