Rika Takahashi | 25 September 2008On Wednesday, 24 September, KEK held a symposium entitled “Starting up the world's most powerful accelerators: LHC and J-PARC” in Tokyo. This symposium was the second one in a series of symposiums aiming for gaining more understanding of accelerator science. The main audience of this symposium was the industry. “We would like to place an emphasis on the collaboration between industry, the universities and the laboratories which enable those big accelerator projects,” said Mitsuaki Nozaki, the chief organiser of the symposium. “I believe that efforts like these are essential to realise another big accelerator project in the future, such as the ILC,” he added.
Category: Feature | Tagged: J-PARC, KEK
Barbara Warmbein | 11 September 2008Wednesday must have been one of the biggest days in science history. It certainly was the biggest day in particle physics for a long time coming - the first full beam around the LHC. The first protons completed the full circle at 10:28 am (less than an hour after first injection), and scientists in CERN's control rooms cheered and clapped, ran to the screens, pointed at monitors and breathed a massive, communal sigh of relief. Amazingly, after a cryogenic glitch around lunchtime, another first beam made its first full lap in the opposite direction at 15:03. The media centre in CERN's Globe was abuzz, French media had gathered in a Paris bar to follow the events, German press was connected via a multi-way videoconference and at Fermilab scientists and press watched in dressing gown and pyjamas. It was a picture-book start-up.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CERN, LHC
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
