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
Elizabeth Clements | 3 May 2007Last week, more than 100 scientists from around the world met at Fermilab to discuss recipes for baking, rinsing and polishing. Not the kind used for baking a cake, instead attendees at the TESLA Technology Collaboration meeting shared information about developing the optimal recipe for pushing superconducting radiofrequency, or SCRF, technology forward.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Fermilab, TESLA Technology Collaboration, TTC
Nobuko Kobayashi | 26 April 2007The baseline design for the International Linear Collider (ILC) positron source is based on multi-MeV photons that produce pairs in a metallic target. The photons are created by the main electron beam passing through a helical undulator. The conventional method, positron generation via pair production using an electron beam, which is used as the positron source in all existing accelerators in the world, is adopted however as an alternative technology in the Baseline Configuration Document (BCD).
Category: Feature | Tagged: BINP, Russia, Russian Federation
Elizabeth Clements | 19 April 2007At last week's Silicon Detector (SiD) concept meeting, participants used several words starting with the letter F -- Flow, as in particle flow; Funding, as in the need for more resources and manpower to fund detector R&D project; and Freezing, as in the weather at Fermilab. Approximately 70 members of SiD met at Fermilab to share the latest R&D results and plan for the future, namely how to prepare a draft Concept Design Report by this time next year.
Category: Feature | Tagged: SiD
Elizabeth Clements | 12 April 2007With a brand new floor and freshly cleaned out space, Fermilab's New Muon Laboratory is about to become the new home to a sixty-metre-long accelerator that will serve as a test area for ILC R&D. Until recently, the New Muon Laboratory housed the 2000-ton Chicago cyclotron magnet for more than 24 years. The newly renovated area will now be used to test cryomodules for the ILC with an electron beam.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Fermilab, New Muon Laboratory
5 April 2007The Temple of Heaven, a masterpiece of architecture and landscape design in Beijing symbolises the relationship between earth and heaven - the human society and the universe - which stands at the heart of Chinese cosmology. It was the central image on the poster for the 9th ACFA ILC Physics & Detector Workshop and ILC GDE Meeting in February 2007 at IHEP in Beijing, where the ILC reference design and preliminary cost were officially announced. Although the walkway towards the ILC is as long as that in the Temple of Heaven, China is now taking steady steps and making more contributions to the realisation of the ILC. This interest manifests itself in the Chinese scientists' unanimous support for China's participation in the ILC, which has been demonstrated during the Fragrant Mountain Meeting, held at the end of 2006, the expanding collaboration with KEK and other labs worldwide, the ILC GDE Meeting held in Beijing this February, and the various R&D efforts in progress at IHEP and other institutes.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerator R&D, Beijing, BILC078, China, IHEP
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 5 April 2007Before accelerating electrons and positrons, cavities need to undergo a number of treatments, such as chemical and electropolishing, the last one being baking. The standard baking procedure heats the cavity at 120°C for two days with an ultra high vacuum (UHV) requirement. These very restrictive conditions are unfortunately not appropriate for the treatment of 16,000 cavities that the ILC requires.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cavity baking, DAPNIA, France, Saclay
Barbara Warmbein | 29 March 2007When scientists take their detector prototypes to a test beam they enter a parallel world. Many basic needs are put on hold - the need for sunlight, regular meals or eight hours of sleep, for example. What counts is the beam time: you have three days, weeks or months to test your equipment, and you have to make the best of it because you might not get another chance. A team from Japan and Korea have just reached the halfway point of their time in the DESY test beam, calibrating, checking and recording data with their electromagnetic calorimeter prototype.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, DESY, detector R&D, ECal, HCal
