1 April 2010Geneva, 30 March 2010. Beams collided at 7 TeV in the LHC at 13:06 CEST, marking the start of the LHC research programme. Particle physicists around the world are looking forward to a potentially rich harvest of new physics as the LHC begins its first long run at an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
Barbara Warmbein | 25 March 2010In a venue that many ILC people know very well from last year's TILC meeting, the Epochal Conference Center in Tsukuba, Japan, another meeting is underway that may well change the course of physics research for scientists from Europe and Asia. The Asia Europe Physics Summit ASEPS covers all areas of physics research, from nanotechnology and energy to medical research and accelerator development. It goes even further than that: it looks at the history of collaboration between Asia and Europe and combines lessons learnt from the past with plans for future projects like the ILC. Follow it live via videoconference; instructions are given below.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ASEPS, Asia, Europe
18 March 2010Yesterday the science news media and twitterverse were abuzz following a BBC News article announcing “LHC to shut down for a year to address design faults.” Readers – and the news outlets that frantically re-reported the BBC article – assumed that CERN had found a new problem with the LHC and announced an imminent shutdown. Neither is the case. Here, we join our fellow science writers and bloggers in setting the record straight about the LHC’s next long shutdown.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
Barbara Warmbein | 11 March 2010A team from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich just found scientific evidence for the old saying that less is more. By shaving off a piece of scintillating tile, they achieved test results that were considerably better than tests with a tile that was complete. The trick: stick a silicon photomultiplier into the shaved-off groove, rather than just on the outside of the tile. “After quite a few iterations, we came up with a shape for the plastic tile that works extremely well. It also now includes a SiPM that is embedded into the tile, which is important for a realistic calorimeter since then the individual cells can be placed edge on edge, without any gaps between them,” explains the team leader Frank Simon. Frank Simon is also an active blogger on Quantum Diaries, and one of his most recent entries features an explanation of tiles, fibres and photomultipliers and how they came up with the idea of reshaping the tile.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, scintillator, SiPM
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 4 March 2010Last week, collaborators from the ILC-HiGrade European Commission Framework 7 Project gathered at CERN, Switzerland for their annual meeting. Each project work package, from cavity, coupler and tuner production to ILC governance studies, was reviewed on 25 February. The ILC-HiGrade project is conducted by six European institutions: DESY, CEA, CERN, CNRS/IN2P3, INFN and Oxford University. 'ILC-HiGrade' stands for 'International Linear Collider and High Gradient Superconducting RF-Cavities' and one of the main objectives of the proposal is a small serial production of accelerating cavities at highest gradients.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Europe, ILC HiGrade
Rika Takahashi | 25 February 2010Following the successful cavity string work for superconducting acceleration cavities from Europe and Americas, a team of four scientists and engineers form INFN, Italy and Fermilab, US, arrived in Japan for the assembly work of the frequency tuners for S1-global work.
Category: Feature | Tagged: KEK, S1-global
18 February 2010In a provocative section of a talk at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, DC, yesterday, theorist Matthew Strassler from Rutgers University challenged particle theorists to not be too simple in their analyses. Most people would probably not claim that theoretical particle physics is too simple, but Strassler argued that nature is likely to be even more complicated than physicists expect. And if theorists only properly examine the simplest classes of models, where simple is a relative term, they might be led astray in interpreting future Large Hadron Collider data.
Category: Feature | Tagged: American Physical Society, APS, United States
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 11 February 2010Some 100 members of the International Large Detector (ILD) group gathered from 27 to 30 January 2010 in Paris, France, deep in the academic Latin Quarter area. This fourth ILD workshop was the first dedicated ILD meeting after the concept was validated in 2009 by the research directorate.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILD, ILD Detector
4 February 2010Last week, the Chamonix workshop once again proved its worth as a place where all the stakeholders in the LHC can come together, take difficult decisions and reach a consensus on important issues for the future of particle physics. The most important decision we reached last week is to run the LHC for 18 to 24 months at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam). After that, we’ll go into a long shutdown in which we’ll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC’s design collision energy of 14 TeV for the next run. This means that when beams go back into the LHC later this month, we’ll be entering the longest phase of accelerator operation in CERN’s history, scheduled to take us into summer or autumn 2011.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, Chamonix, LHC
Rika Takahashi | 28 January 2010Four superconducting accelerating cavities have been successfully assembled at KEK’s Superconducting RF Test Facility (STF). From 14 to 22 January, the assembly team of technical staff from DESY and Fermilab visited KEK, and completed cavity-string assembly work in the STF cleanroom, making a wonderful start for S1 global, a crucial system test towards realising the International Linear Collider.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cavity string, DESY, Japan, KEK, STF
