11 September 2008Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN1 was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world's most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
4 September 2008Faster, higher, farther! The motto of this year's Olympic Games is also valid for the development of research opportunities. But unlike the Olympic athletes who struggle to beat world records by fractions of hundredths, the development of accelerator experiments is progressing in such extreme steps that researchers have to clear completely new hurdles – their measuring instruments are too inaccurate.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, IEEE
Barbara Warmbein | 28 August 2008The international time projection chamber (TPC) team that works on R&D for future ILC detectors used to have a bit of a running gag. Somebody would proclaim that “the field cage will arrive next week” and everybody else would chuckle because week after week it didn’t arrive. Chuckling days are over now: after several years of planning the cage for the large TPC prototype, ordering it from industry, checking the quality, rejecting parts of the product and reordering, the nearly one-metre-long barrel with an inner diameter of 72 centimetres has finally arrived at DESY in Hamburg. First tests indicate that it will finally meet the team's high requirements.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, detector R&D, time projection chamber, TPC
28 August 2008On 18 and 19 August, a total of 38 leading Japanese creators, including science-fiction and fantasy writers, animation movie directors, comic artists, illustrators, and photographers, visited J-PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Complex) in Tokai-village and KEK Tsukuba campus. This visit was coordinated by Junpei Fujimoto, a KEK scientist who is active in ILC outreach activities.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Asia, KEK
Barbara Warmbein | 21 August 2008Which is the right word to complete this series: KEK, Snowmass, Hamburg, ... ? Chicago of course! After the first three venues, the fourth General ILC Workshop (ILC08) will take place in Chicago this year, organised in conjunction with the 2008 Linear Collider Workshop LCWS. As in the past, the workshop is supposed to bring detector and accelerator communities together. Results and plans from both worlds will be discussed in several joint plenary sessions.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Chicago, ILC08, LCWS, LCWS08, UIC, United States
Rika Takahashi | 21 August 2008This summer the International Linear Collider made a debut in world famous "Comiket" Comic Market, held in Tokyo. Comike is the world's largest comic convention with a history of over a quarter of a century, and is the hall of fame of the "Otaku" culture. More than half a million attendees came from all over the world for this three-day event. So, what did all these people come for? The answer is the "doujinshi," self-published publications which are usually manga or novels. Most works are written and edited by amateur writers or artists, but some are famous professionals who started from doujinshi. People wanting to buy their works sometimes have to wait for more than three hours.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Japan
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 14 August 2008There it is: the LHC will start up in four weeks! We know the date of this special day when the protons will be injected into the tunnel: 10 September 2008. All eyes are on the LHC… but not exclusively. The start-up event as well as many other events which will follow are unique opportunities to promote our field, particle physics and science in general.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILC communication, LHC communication
Barbara Warmbein | 31 July 2008In a linear accelerator, energy conservation is not really on the achievement list. To get up to the required luminosity, accelerator experts have one chance to push the particle beams to their limits, putting much energy into the bunches, correcting, scraping and tweaking them along the way only to smash them into each other and direct the straggly remains into a dump. Not so an Energy Recovery Linac, currently at the design and first prototype stage at Cornell University. The electron beams also get dumped after one run, but before that happens, they are tricked into handing over their energy back to the superconducting machine that accelerated them.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerator R&D, CESR, Cornell University, electron gun, energy recovery linac, ERL, injector
Rika Takahashi | 24 July 2008On the first day of a three-day weekend with a Japanese national holiday, Day of the Sea, about 300 people changed their destination from seaside to science. They enjoyed talks on cool science on a hot Saturday afternoon in Tokyo at a symposium called “Denshi-koraidah ga toku ucyu sousei no puzzle (Solving the puzzle of the universe with electron-positron colliders),” organised by KEK. The symposium introduced the science to be delivered by future electron-positron colliders to a non-scientific audience. The symposium was a two-part event. The first part consisted of talks by three top-notch scientists – Hitoshi Murayama, Director General of Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU), Shoken Miyama, Director General of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and Atsuto Suzuki, Director General of KEK. The second part was a panel discussion with those three scientists and Shinji Kimoto, a science-fiction novelist who wrote the award-winning novel 'Kamisama no Puzzle', and was moderated by Shigehiko Nakajima, Editor-in-Chief of Nikkei Science Magazine, the Japanese edition of Scientific American.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Japan, KEK, outreach
17 July 2008Yoji Totsuka, the former director general of KEK and an outstanding contributor to great advances in neutrino physics, died of cancer at the age of 66 on Thursday, July 10.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Japan
