This 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 […]
XFEL coupler industrialisation at LAL
During 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 […]
Construction of Fermilab’s ILC Test Area moves forward
As 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. Getting ready to house the first crymodules: Fermilab’s […]
Getting the interaction point right
Like 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 […]
Good vibrations at Fermilab
Vibrations 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 […]
From SLAC Today: Clearing Clouds
Clouds 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. In curved sections of accelerators, such as a damping ring, the beam throws off […]
High grades for HiGrade
It’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 […]
Mapping a magnet
Three 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 […]
The power of X rays for the ILC
Producing 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 […]
Crabbing in the cavity
What 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 […]