Leah Hesla | 2 December 2010To see one example of tunnel safety done right, scientists and engineers in the linear collider community took a tour of the Mont Blanc tunnel earlier this autumn. The road tunnel, an 11.6-kilometre thoroughfare that connects France and Italy, is a model of safety in civil engineering.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CFS, conventional facilities and siting, tunnel
Rika Takahashi | 24 November 2010What will happen when the ILC is built? One hopes discoveries will change the way we see the universe. It will answer the questions about what the universe is made of. And maybe it will help generate new Nobel Prize winners...
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILC site, Japan
Leah Hesla | 18 November 2010A research team at Jefferson Lab has developed its own detailed set of rules for optimal cleaning. Team members have been working on a regimen for removing imperfections and impurities from superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) niobium cavities. Their procedures, they believe, have helped create cavities that could exceed ILC 2010 performance benchmarks.
Category: Feature | Tagged: electropolishing, JLab
Leah Hesla | 4 November 2010Scientists led by a group at Argonne National Laboratory are bringing pictures of hadronic showers into sharper focus with the Digital Hadron Calorimeter, or DHCAL, one of several hadron calorimeter options for the ILC detector. The Argonne group began testing the device last month at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Argonne, DHCAL, Digital Hadron Calorimeter
Barbara Warmbein | 28 October 2010As the first in a planned series of workshops, the International Workshop on Linear Colliders had many accomplished missions on the agenda. The ILC, for example, has passed its self-imposed fifty percent mark: half of the nine-cell superconducting radiofrequency cavities produced in the world now reach the desired gradient. The Compact Linear Collider Study (CLIC) has shown that it can generate a high-intensity drive beam by beam manipulation. And both linear collider communities have demonstrated that they get mutual benefit from working together on common issues and meeting once a year to discuss them in plenary.
Category: Feature | Tagged: IWLC10
21 October 2010For the first time in a meeting of this scope, this year’s International Workshop on Linear Colliders in Geneva, Switzerland, brings together researchers from both of the world's major linear collider projects: the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider. Organised by the European Committee for Future Accelerators, the conference is held at CERN and at the International Conference Centre in Geneva. Scientists discuss the status of the two machines and the physics they could uncover. Break-out sessions allow scientists to exchange ideas related to accelerator and detector technologies. Our photo album shows some impressions from the first days.
Category: Feature, Slideshow | Tagged: IWLC10, photo album
14 October 2010A sunburst image of a particle detector at Germany's DESY laboratory and a black-and-white photograph of a nuclear-physics experiment at TRIUMF in Canada have won the top prizes in the first-ever Global Particle Physics Photowalk.
Category: Feature | Tagged: photography, photowalk
7 October 2010At the end of 2012, the Global Design Effort (GDE) will release its Technical Design Report. At the same time, the Research Directorate (RD) and the ILC community will produce detailed baseline designs for two detectors.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CPDG, ILCSC, Project Design Guidance
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 7 October 2010It's hard to imagine a particle physics experiment that wouldn't use one of his concepts. Georges Charpak, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, passed away last week. Particle physicists owe him a lot, and so does the general public, since his inventions yield applications in many other fields that use ionising radiation such as biology, radiology and nuclear medicine.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Charpak, multi-wire proportional chamber
Barbara Warmbein | 30 September 2010A woman kneels, almost devoutly, in front of a piece of beam pipe. One man is lying flat on his belly, squinting along the underside of a long step illuminated by blue warning lights. Another sits cross-legged opposite a barrel wheel of a particle detector and studies its forms. A new meditation class for particle physicists? No - just the world’s first global particle physics photo walk.
Category: Feature | Tagged: photography, photowalk
