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
29 January 2009Something unwanted lurks within accelerator beam pipes around the world: stray electrons. This haze of electrons interacts with positron and proton beams, often causing distortion. Previous tests showed that an insert designed by SLAC researchers works well to capture stray electrons in an environment with no magnetic field. Now, recent tests carried out at the Japanese accelerator facility KEK confirm that a new insert can reduce this electron cloud effect in a magnetic field.
Category: Feature | Tagged: beam pipe, SLAC
22 January 2009A new beamline for R&D toward nano-meter electron beam has started operation at KEK's Accelerator Test Facility - ATF. This new beamline, called ATF2, is an extension of ATF, and the focus of the research there will be on establishing the technologies for creation and control of a nano-meter-sized electron beam.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ATF, ATF2, KEK
Rika Takahashi | 15 January 2009Toshihide Maskawa is one of the most popular public figures in Japan at the moment. He has charmed many Japanese people with his humour and pure passion for the science that he showed at the press conference after he won the 2008 Nobel prize in physics, together with Yoichiro Nambu, professor emeritus at Chicago University, and Makoto Kobayashi, honorary professor emeritus at KEK.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Japan, Nobel prize
