Rika Takahashi | 8 July 2010On 1-2 June, the review on the design study of the ILC conventional facility in mountain regions was held at KEK, Japan, and the final review report was submitted last week by the review panel lead by Vic Kuchler of Fermilab to Seiya Yamaguchi, head of KEK's Linear Collider Office and to Marc Ross, project manager of the Global Design Effort (GDE) in charge of the conventional facility study (GDE/CFS).
Category: Feature | Tagged: Asia, CFS, conventional facilities, single tunnel
Rika Takahashi | 1 July 2010The ILC will have an ultra-cold and complex heart made of niobium, a rare, soft, grey, and ductile transition metal. Some 18,000 radio frequency (RF) accelerating cavities for the ILC will be made of niobium, which becomes superconductor when cooled to nearly absolute zero. The global annual production of niobium in 2007 was 58,000 tonnes, and it is expected to grow up to 45 percent more in 2010 with a positive trend towards economic recovery. Although it is a 'rare' material, the reserves of niobium are assumed to be enough to cover the current world demand for 500 years
Category: Feature | Tagged: industrialisation, niobium, SRF industrialisation
Min Zhang | 24 June 2010Jie Gao, professor at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, China, has been appointed by the Asian Committee for Future Accelerators (ACFA) to be the new chair of the Asian Linear Collider Steering Committee (ALCSC) for a term of three years. The appointment occurred during the First International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC'10. “I feel that it is a great honour for me to serve as the new chairman of ALCSC, and at the same time I feel a great responsibility to fulfil this role of promoting and coordinating ILC activities in Asia with good accordance and communication with other regions,” said Gao.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Asia, Asian Linear Collider Steering Committee
10 June 2010The POSIPOL 2010 workshop was held from 31 May to 2 June at KEK. It was the fifth in the POSIPOL series of workshops dealing with the physics aspects, the design issues, and the open questions concerning a polarised positron source in the framework of the next-generation electron-positron colliders such as the ILC or the Compact Linear Collider Study CLIC. A total of 44 scientists from Europe, Asia and the US attended the workshop, including some via videoconference. The main topic of the POSIPOL 2010 was design of the polarized positron sources for the ILC and for CLIC. The only linear accelerator which used a positron beam was the SLAC Linear Collider (SLC) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US "For CLIC, we will need to produce 18 times more positrons than SLC, and 65 times more for the ILC", said Dr. Louis Rinolfi (CERN), who is convener of the ILC/CLIC joint working group for positron studies, "these numbers show how far we are from what where want to be," Rinolfi said.
Category: Feature | Tagged: KEK, PosiPol
Min Zhang | 3 June 2010In June, a lot of Chinese students graduate from different schools. Sha Bai, a PhD student from the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), is one of them. “I enjoy my research work very much. I like ATF2, ILC and CLIC a lot,” said Bai, who just received her doctoral degree in June 2010 working on ATF2 (Accelerator Test Facility 2) at KEK in Japan, with the goal to reach 37-nanometre vertical beam size at the interaction point, both in beam optics and experimental work.
Category: Feature, Profile | Tagged: ATF2, China, IHEP
Rika Takahashi | 27 May 2010One day before the beginning of the biggest ever – and first international – Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC 2010, a satellite meeting was held with scientists and specialists from laboratories and industries around the world on the superconducting radiofrequency (SCRF) cavity technology and industrialisation.
Category: Feature | Tagged: IPAC, IPAC 2010, Particle Accelerator Conference, SRF industrialisation, SRF technology
Barbara Warmbein | 13 May 2010The Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors at Accelerators (AIDA) proposal has received top grades from the European Commission, meaning that the multi-disciplinary multi-institutional detector development project will definitely go ahead. Out of 47 submitted proposals, AIDA came second with a score of 14.5 out of 15. The only catch is that the EC cut the proposed funding from 10 to 8 million Euros, reducing the full funding to just under 28 million Euros over four years. The project partners are now in the process of redefining the scope of the project in order to match the new budget, but are planning to keep as much as possible to the originally foreseen work. The coordinators and the EC are currently in a negotiation phase and the starting date of AIDA is expected for early 2011.
Category: Feature | Tagged: AIDA, detector R&D, Europe
6 May 2010With a growing demand for particle accelerators in science, medicine, and industry, accelerator science is in desperate need of skilled specialists.
Category: Feature | Tagged: job
29 April 2010Do you enjoy explaining to friends and family what you do and why you do it? Would you like to share your knowledge about superconductivity, string theory, governance, the Higgs, beam steering, particle detectors or whatever else you are an expert in? With the LHC running and delivering the first physics results, more people wonder what will come next – and some of them use the 'Ask a scientist' service on www.linearcollider.org. We are looking for experts from all areas of the ILC who would like to volunteer to take part in the 'Ask a scientist' service.
Category: Feature | Tagged: outreach
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 22 April 2010What do the ILC and environmental protection have in common? The answer is: superconducting cavities. The European MYRRHA is an experimental facility aimed to demonstrate the technical feasibility of nuclear waste transmutation in an accelerator-driven system. The main part of the accelerator will consist in a series of superconducting cavities. At INFN Milano, Italy, a group has transferred all its experience from the TESLA Technology Collaboration and ILC for the development of elliptical proton cavities for this application. Last month, a prototype cryomodule containing one low-beta elliptical cavity was installed in dedicated test stand at the IPNO/Supratech technological platform in Orsay, France.
Category: Feature | Tagged: INFN, Italy, Milano, MYRRHA, TESLA
