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
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 14 January 2010Next march, Tiger Year, a joint meeting of the Linear Collider Workshop (LCWS10) and the International Linear Collider meeting (ILC2010) will be held from 26-30 March 2010 in Beijing, China. Three years after the ILC Reference Design Report release and the preliminary cost estimate of the machine in Beijing, the whole community of accelerator and detector physicists will gather again in China for another important step forward. “The ILC Chinese institutes are honoured and glad to host this meeting, as we expect great results from these five days,” said Jie Gao, co–chair of the local organising committee. “We hope that many of our colleagues will be able to attend.”
Category: Feature | Tagged: Beijing, China, ILC2010, LCWS10
7 January 2010A big Christmas gift arrived at KEK from Italy. On 25 December, KEK's Superconducting radiofrequency Test Facility (STF) welcomed the cryomodule for "S1-global" - a crucial system test towards realizing the International Linear Collider (ILC), a proposed next generation electron-positron collider.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Italy, Japan, KEK, S1-global, STF
17 December 2009Reviewing a year that is coming to an end can be a bit like time travel. While some events seem like they happened only yesterday others seem so long ago that it is hard to believe they happened only a few months ago. Here are some events and developments that were not only important this year but also put the ILC project on a status timeline.
Category: Feature | Tagged: 2009, overview
10 December 2009For physicist Nobu Toge, a typical day of work at the Japanese high-energy physics lab KEK might involve attending a few meetings, calibrating a just-installed piece of equipment, or writing a report on the research's progress. But in the midst of it all, Toge might also pull out his always-ready camera and snap a photo of a gleaming piece of machinery, or a pair of technicians in bunny suits readying a component for testing. At the end of the day, reports and spreadsheets laid to rest, Toge will add the photos to the thousands he's taken on the job over the last seven or eight years.
Category: Feature | Tagged: KEK, profile
Barbara Warmbein | 3 December 2009Greek mythology, cartoon characters and plays on words – projects and collaborations in high-energy physics don’t always conform to the stereotype of the incomprehensible acronym. If a new project to be submitted to the European Commission for funding, answering a call from it Seventh Framework programme (FP7), gets approval, the world of opera can be added to the list above. AIDA – for Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors and Accelerators (the E from European is silent) – would draw together every group and project in Europe working on detector R&D for next-generation projects.
Category: Feature | Tagged: AIDA, Europe, FP7, Framework Program
25 November 2009Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the look out for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
19 November 2009The Quantum Beam Project, a year–old project to study and utilise the quantum nature of particle beams at KEK, is developing a commercial version of a new affordable, compact X–ray source. The aim of the project is to develop a compact and high-quality particle source for broad commercial use in medicine, life science, information technology, nanotechnology, and quantum science. The project's name, Quantum Beam, refers to beams of particles like neutrons, photons, and ions, which exhibit quantum mechanical behaviours, and the unique feature of the project is to take advantage of this nature to promote the technology transfer of an affordable compact X–ray source to hospitals and research institutions.
Category: Feature | Tagged: KEK, X-ray source
Rika Takahashi | 12 November 2009In late October, the fast kickers at the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at KEK have successfully kicked the beam bunches in 5.6 nanoseconds. Conditioning these bunches is the job of the damping rings, and the kicker system is one of the crucial technologies which hold the key of the damping ring performance.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ATF, KEK, kicker
