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
Elizabeth Clements | 9 August 2007Vibrations in the cryomodules in the International Linear Collider are actually not a good thing. The slightest disruption can throw off the alignment of the super sensitive beams and prevent them from colliding. The stringent beam dynamic requirements in the ILC therefore make vibration studies important, which is why Fermilab recently installed measuring devices called geophones in their Horizontal Test Stand. So for the team at Fermilab, detecting vibrations now, during an R&D phase, is actually a good thing because it means that they can learn how to minimise them in the actual machine when every collision counts.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Fermilab, geophone, horizontal test stand, United States, vibrations
9 August 2007Clouds might be welcome during a drought, but you definitely don't want them in your beam pipes. Researchers around the world are working out how to keep a section of the proposed International Linear Collider—the positron damping ring—clear of electron clouds.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerator R&D, damping ring, electron cloud, SLAC
Barbara Warmbein | 2 August 2007It’s the age of electronic mail, but in the last weeks Eckhard Elsen from DESY took several trips per day to his snail mail in-tray down the corridor because he was waiting for an important letter. Then finally a letter and an email arrived from Brussels saying that contract negotiations for a six-lab proposal managed by Elsen will start soon. ILC-HiGrade, or “International Linear Collider and High Gradient Superconducting RF-Cavities” is a proposal for the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), which is asked to prepare for contract negotiations with a funding sum of up to five million Euros.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILC HiGrade
Barbara Warmbein | 26 July 2007Three pairs of eyes cast one last look around the room. Have all scissors, ladders, metallic tables been removed? No pins or pens lying around anymore? Once the team is sure that nothing is left in the area, they close the security doors and give the go-ahead – the magnet that has been to space can be charged for the first time since its arrival at its new home in the DESY test beam. Before its field of 1 Tesla can bend the tracks of particles in a EUDET detector prototype, however, the scientists have to map the field very precisely. And they don't want steel-capped boots flying into the coil.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, EUDET, KEK, magnetic field map
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 19 July 2007Producing intense polarised positrons for the ILC is very challenging. Stability, energy, luminosity are the key words. Parallel to the baseline studies on a helical undulator-based source (see Newsline from 19 October 2006), other groups, like the laser group at LAL (IN2P3/CNRS), Orsay (France), pursue R&D on a Compton positron source. The Orsay team recently measured an unprecedented enhancement factor of the pulsed laser beam inside their Fabry-Perot cavity. They expect bigger factors in a few months.
Category: Feature | Tagged: France, LAL, positron source
Rika Takahashi | 12 July 2007What do superconducting cavities and the beach have in common? KEK accelerator physicists can give you the answer: the crab. During the spring operation period of the KEKB accelerator, scientists successfully achieved effective electron-positron collisions in a new cavity. Called the crab cavity, it tilts each bunch sideways so that the bunches collide head-on at the interaction point. This success will allow the KEKB to boost its luminosity, which is already the world’s highest for a B-factory, to an unprecedented level. Crab cavities will also play an important role in achieving high luminosities at other machines, including the International Linear Collider (ILC), upgrades for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, as well as future synchrotron light sources.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerator R&D, Asia, crab cavity
