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
Rika Takahashi | 21 June 2007Humitaka Sato, a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, is one of the most respected theoretical physicists in Japan. He served as an advisor to the Japanese government for international projects such as the International Space Station (ISS) and International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). In addition to his highly technical work, he authored several books that invite broad audiences to explore the world of physics.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Japan
14 June 2007The calorimeters for the ILC detectors have to show excellent performance if researchers want to fully exploit the physics potential of the ILC. Many processes that are unique for the physics programme of the ILC are characterised by multiple-jet production that can be reconstructed by new calorimetry techniques to very high energies with unprecedented precision. The goal is to improve the jet energy resolution already achieved by a factor of two to fulfil the physics requirements the best possible way. Hence we need to develop these novel technologies and show that they work by ‘proof of principle’.
Category: Feature | Tagged: calorimetry R&D, detector R&D, review
Elizabeth Clements | 31 May 2007What do the International Linear Collider and nuclear waste transmutation, cargo inspection or food and water sterilisation have in common? Technology. The same technology that the ILC will use to explore the fundamental nature of the universe may also have potential applications in other areas of science and industry. This is what a group of ILC scientists and industry met to discuss at an ILC Technical Applications Workshop on 15 May in Dulles, Virginia.
Category: Feature | Tagged: technology benefits, technology transfer
Barbara Warmbein | 24 May 2007Challenges are all around for cavities that want to perform well. The material they are made of, the way they have been cleaned, they way they are shaped and they way their cells are welded together all influence the way the electrons fly through them. A process called hydroforming might be a means to tackle the last two threats, and a small team from DESY has just created the first all-niobium hydroformed nine-cell cavity.
Category: Feature | Tagged: hydroforming
Elizabeth Clements | 24 May 2007The newest resident in Fermilab’s Meson Detector Building is up and running. Last week, Fermilab scientists installed a nine-cell 1.3 GHz TESLA-style cavity into a cryostat in order to commission the new Horizontal Test Stand. Designed to test both 3.9 Ghz and 1.3 Ghz 9-cell niobium cavities, the Horizontal Test Stand will play an important role in the growing ILC R&D programme at Fermilab.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerating gradient, cavity gradient, Fermilab, horizontal test stand
Elizabeth Clements | 17 May 2007RDR meet your other half. A draft version of the Detector Concept Report for the International Linear Collider is now available online. In February, the Global Design Effort published the draft Reference Design Report, providing the first detailed technical snapshot of the accelerator. The DCR completes the picture and makes the physics and detector case for the ILC.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DCR, Detector Concept Report, detector concepts
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 10 May 2007Even the best detector will be useless without clever reconstruction algorithms and software. On 2-4 May 2007, the ILC Software Workshop was held at LAL, Orsay (France). The whole chain of data processing was reviewed there: software framework and tools, algorithms and physics results. At the end of the workshop, DESY physicist Ties Behnke summarised that significant progress has been achieved over the past year and important performance milestones are close to being reached, even though the community is still small. Cambridge physicist Mark Thomson, finished his contribution declaring he was now convinced that Particle Flow Algorithm (PFA) can meet the ILC performance goals at 500 GeV and 1 TeV.
Category: Feature | Tagged: France, ILC Software Workshop, LAL, LCIO, software
Rika Takahashi | 10 May 2007“Less than 50 percent.” This is the shocking data that Kazuo Nishimura, the head of the Economic Research Institute at Kyoto University, one of the well-respected educational institutes in Japan, reported in his book University students who cannot calculate fraction numbers. Nishimura believes that the ILC could be one of the remedies to fix the world-wide epidemic of students moving away from science. ILC NewsLine recently had the opportunity to discuss this growing trend with the economics professor.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Japan
