Barbara Warmbein | 9 April 2009New science project in their planning stages are a bit of a hothouse for new ideas, innovative solutions and maybe even breakthroughs in technology. The ILC is right in the middle of this stage: R&D is in full swing, scientists pursue various solutions to meeting the high demands of the machine and detectors. No wonder then that people are already thinking of ways to transfer the technologies developed for the different areas of the ILC to other projects or disciplines: medicine, biology, drug research, computing, environment and many others.
Category: Feature | Tagged: technology benefits, technology transfer
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 2 April 2009One is Australian, the other German. Both are physicist willing to share their everyday lives as particle physicists working on the ILC project. Together with eight other diarists, they joined the new Quantum Diaries blog launched on 31 March 2009.
Category: Feature | Tagged: blog, blogger, ILC blog, quantum diaries
26 March 2009This is the second report on the two detector meetings held in Korea in February, ILD and CALICE, this time focusing on the CALICE (Calorimeter for the linear collider experiment) collaboration spring meeting at Kyungpook National University in Daegu on 19 and 20 February. CALICE, launched in 2002, meets twice a year to discuss the R&D issues of calorimetry technologies and the large-scale test beam experiments, specifically in the recent meetings to prepare for the world’s first test on a digital hadron calorimeter.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, Korea
19 March 2009A Silicon Detector (SiD) workshop was held at SLAC from 2 to 4 March, with the express purpose of reviewing the status of the SiD Letter of Intent, organising the final steps in its completion, and beginning to think of life after the LOI.
Category: Feature | Tagged: LOI, SiD, SLAC
Barbara Warmbein | 12 March 2009The ILC is not the only accelerator that has to struggle against electron clouds and their distracting effect on the particle beam. Even the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN may suffer from it, and tests on two of its pre-accelerators, the PS and the SPS, have already proven several techniques with which the electron-cloud build-up can be avoided or at least be brought under better control. One of those techniques is ‘scrubbing’, and it does what it says on the packet: it scrubs the beam pipe clean from the inside. It does not do this with bucket, cloth and detergent, however. Instead, a beam at the highest possible intensity, the limit of what the machines can take, is pumped through, literally getting hoovered by the vacuum pumps.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, electron cloud, LHC, scrubbing
Barbara Warmbein | 5 March 2009When talking about what they know and what they want to find out, physicists like to speak about ‘landscapes’. There are the well-chartered lands of the Standard Model and undiscovered territories like the Terascale – a region that the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN will enter when protons start colliding in autumn. With the LHC and its eventful proton-proton collisions scientists expect a whole range of signatures of expected and new physics, and they will need a machine to follow up on these to get a clearer view. In February, a group of more than one hundred theorists and experimentalists met at CERN for three weeks. Their goal was to outline the landscapes they may find with data from the LHC and to develop strategies for how to pick the right tools for the coming expedition.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, future accelerators, future colliders
26 February 2009One of the high-value R&D programmes for the ILC is to reliably reach gradients of 35 Megavolts per metre (MV/m) in one-metre long (9-cell, 1.3-Gigahertz) niobium cavities, the heart of the main linac. More than a dozen such cavities have demonstrated gradients between 35 and 40 MV/m at DESY, and more recently at Jlab. The challenge is to hit such performance levels nearly every time, and with nearly every cavity! This means that we need to conduct some good science to understand the basic nature of the gradient limits, and clever engineering to invent methods to overcome these.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cavity gradient, Superconducting RF
Rika Takahashi | 19 February 2009“I am very much honoured to be given this opportunity to work with the ILC communicators and to be involved in promoting a science project of this scale,” said Misato Hayashida. A fourth ILC communicator has joined the Global Design Effort. Misato Hayashida, based at KEK, will be sharing the Asian communication duties with Rika Takahashi and will closely collaborate with her European colleagues, Perrine Royole-Degieux (CNRS/IN2P3) and Barbara Warmbein (DESY).
Category: Feature | Tagged: Asia, ILC Communicators
Barbara Warmbein | 12 February 2009The small town of Schenefeld just outside Hamburg in northern Germany isn't exactly known for its sights or its tourism. Many Schenefeld citizens, however, have recently become tourists in their own neighbourhood: ever since the construction works for the European XFEL started on 8 January, the building site sees a steady flow of visitors stopping by on or from their way to the shops, checking on progress, curious about their new neighbour. While the whole ILC project can learn a lot from this curiosity (namely establishing good contact with neighbours when construction for the collider starts), one specific group is digging deeper: the 'conventional facilities and siting (CF&S)' team is establishing close contacts to experts working on the European XFEL to learn from them and to help when possible.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CFS, conventional facilities, conventional facilities and siting, XFEL
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 5 February 2009Hundreds of millions of channels of electronics: this is about what the electromagnetic calorimeter (ECal) of the CALICE collaboration will have to design, process and analyse. The very high granularity of ILC detector’s future calorimeter will also be reflected in the ambitious first-stage electronics – or very-front-end electronics, which still needs to be designed. One part of the electronic jigsaw is the analogue-to-digital converter (ADC). At LPC, a CNRS/IN2P3 lab in Clermont-Ferrand, France, the latest ADC prototype fulfills the ILC requirements in terms of resolution, compactness, time of conversion and power consumption.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, CNRS/IN2P3, ECal, France
