Barbara Warmbein | 27 September 2007Scientists are a self-organised and democratic lot. As such, they like bottom-up approaches: ask everybody involved, test all options and find the best and most logical consensus. The most recent example of this approach is the cooperation between the two detector concepts the Large Detector Concept and the Global Large Detector. Starting from first ideas during LCWS in Hamburg this summer, the two groups decided to combine their concepts into one and write a common Letter of Intent.
Category: Feature | Tagged: detector, GLD, ILC, LDC
20 September 2007Experiments in the PEP-II accelerator have shown that beam pipes with grooves can snare unwelcome electrons, greatly reducing the formation of electron clouds that can disturb the beam.
Category: Feature | Tagged: electron cloud
Rika Takahashi | 20 September 2007Since their appointment in May, the three Global Design Effort Project Managers have been busy scheduling and planning the Engineering Design Report kick-off meetings. Since mid-August they have been touring the world for these meetings. Their purpose is, of course, to kick-start the engineering design phase of the International Linear Collider. During one of these recent meetings, from 10-14 September, the members of the ILC community gathered at KEK to discuss conventional facilities and siting, cryomodules and cryogenics.
Category: Feature | Tagged: GDE Project Managers, project managers
Elizabeth Clements | 13 September 2007Get ready for deep-dish pizza and hot dogs piled high with onions, peppers and a pickle because the 2007 American Linear Collider Physics Group and International Linear Collider Global Design Effort meetings are heading for the windy city. Fermilab, located just outside Chicago, Illinois, will host the joint ALCPG07 meeting on 22-26 October in a continuing series of workshops on the physics, detector and accelerator issues of the proposed ILC. Interested participants should register soon, as the deadline to book a hotel room is 21 September.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ALCPG, ALCPG07, Chicago, United States
Elizabeth Clements | 6 September 2007The 1200 parts started to arrive at Fermilab in June. When fully assembled, these many parts will make up the first cryomodule for International Linear Collider R&D in the United States. The ILC will ultimately require 1680 of these cooled modules that hold the superconducting cavities, maintaining a temperature only two degrees above absolute zero. This first US cryomodule -which will only be used for R&D purposes-represents a special collaboration between Fermilab and DESY.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cryomodule, DESY, Fermilab
Rika Takahashi | 6 September 2007“Daegu is exactly a one-hour drive away from Pohang. So I visit Daegu frequently, and vice versa, because people from Kyongpook National University come to Pohang,” said Won Namkung, professor at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and Asian Linear Collider Steering Committee chair. These two cities, Daegu and Pohang, are the centres for Korean ILC R&D. Ever since one of the centres, the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory (PAL), a synchrotron light source facility in Korea, organised an ILC Task Force Team in 2004, the members have been working in various fields of study and have already achieved some milestones.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Korea, PAL, Pohang Accelerator Laboratory
Barbara Warmbein | 30 August 2007This summer, a stage was all the world for some of the men and women of the CALICE collaboration. For the first time, the full prototypes of the electromagnetic calorimeter, the hadronic calorimeter and the tailcatcher and muon tracker (designed and built by international collaborations and assembled in Paris, Hamburg and Northern Illinois respectively) played lead roles in the SPS test beam at CERN. In more than two months, the collaboration collected more than 100 million events, nearly 14 terabytes of data, thus not only testing their prototypes but also the data grid.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, CERN, DESY, HCal
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 23 August 2007During an XFEL (European X-ray laser facility) project meeting, on 2 July at DESY, the main European contributors discussed in-kind contributions for the project. The meeting attendees agreed that France would play a large role in the production of power couplers for the XFEL. The LAL coupler group, at Orsay, will therefore be responsible for following the coupler production, their commissioning and delivery to DESY. To accomplish these tasks, the lab is now pursuing a big effort focused on coupler industrialisation. “This effort will be an exemplary exercise for ILC couplers production,” said Alessandro Variola, head of the LAL group.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cavity coupler, LAL, XFEL
16 August 2007As ILC research and development efforts ramp up around the world, Fermilab is preparing to make an important contribution. Engineers and technicians at the lab’s new ILC Test Area (ILCTA) have worked hard all summer creating a state-of-the-art cryomodule test facility, and the infrastructure is almost complete.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Fermilab, ILCTA
Barbara Warmbein | 16 August 2007Like the rest of society, the ILC community is split into two categories: the early risers and the night owls. Workshop organiser Andrei Seryi considers himself a night owl. Nevertheless he is up at 5 and in the lab at 6 am many days per week these weeks, holding phone meetings with the rest of the world. Some hundred specialists are already extremely busy preparing for the ILC interaction region engineering design workshop, or IRENG07, at SLAC in September. Their goal: to have all the facts together to take important decisions for the ILC’s interaction region.
Category: Feature | Tagged: interaction region, IRENG, push-pull, SLAC
