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
Elizabeth Clements | 5 July 2007When the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) group at KEK decided to upgrade their beam position monitor system in 2005, Marc Ross had a solution. Based at SLAC at the time, he was a longtime collaborator with KEK and familiar with the instrumentation systems used throughout Fermilab’s accelerator complex. In 2006, Ross became the head of Fermilab’s Technical Division and could see how to continue his initiated beam position monitor upgrade efforts at the ATF damping ring. Called Echotek boards, these digital signal processing based systems offer a higher resolution potential – a characteristic that allows physicists to see more details about the beam. As it turned out, Fermilab was willing to make several Echotek boards available for testing the ATF system. Hence a new collaboration was born.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ATF, beam emittance, beam position monitor, Fermilab, KEK, SLAC
Barbara Warmbein | 28 June 2007Those scientists who develop detectors know a few magic words. Test beam is one, chip is one, DAQ is one. Telescope is another – and a prototype of one of these detector R&D ‘wands’ has just been tested in DESY’s 6-GeV electron beam as part of EUDET’s ‘Joint Research Activity 1’. EUDET is a Europe-funded and Europe-wide project for detector R&D, and one of its core activities is to test beam infrastructures – which include the telescope. It was also the first real test beam since the start of this EUDET activity.
Category: Feature | Tagged: EUDET, EUDET telescope
Elizabeth Clements | 28 June 2007The cacophonous tune of cicadas serenaded the physicists at last week’s Department of Energy and National Science Foundation review of the US Detector R&D Programme for the International Linear Collider. Harry Weerts, the High Energy Physics Director at Argonne National Laboratory, where the review took place, vividly remembered the last time the cicadas visited --17 years ago when another detector milestone was in the making. “I remember it well because we were commissioning the DZero detector at Fermilab,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the next time the cicadas come around and seeing what the world looks like then.”
Category: Feature | Tagged: detector R&D, DOE, ILC detectors, NSF, review, United States
Elizabeth Clements | 21 June 2007Mike Herlihy is active in the village of North Aurora, near Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and west of Chicago. He’s been a village trustee for six years, belongs to the Lions Club and served on an advisory committee to evaluate a proposed freeway. As a principal in a roofing company with a background in civil engineering, he’s particularly familiar with construction and how it can affect a community.
Category: Feature | Tagged: citizen task force, Fermilab
