15 February 2007For the proposed International Linear Collider, physicists are trying to both design the most precise calorimeter ever and still be able to afford it. A calorimeter measures the energy of particles in a detector, and is typically the single most expensive part. If you reduce its performance slightly to reduce costs, how much have you sacrificed?
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILC physics
8 February 2007Beijing, China - The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) today announced the release of the Reference Design Report (RDR) for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a proposed future particle accelerator.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Beijing, IHEP, LCWS, Reference Design Report
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 1 February 2007At the heart of the massive ILC detector system, the vertex detector, a compact tracking device about the size of a wine bottle, surrounds the interaction region. This high-tech piece of equipment hosts about a billion pixels in total - equivalent to hundreds of the finest cameras. It works just like a 3-D camera because it measures the tracks of outgoing particles with micron precision. "Building and designing a vertex detector for the ILC is a real challenge," said Marc Winter, a physicist leading a micro-electronics group in IPHC, an IN2P3 Laboratory in Strasbourg, France. "This detector will reach fantastic performances, well beyond what was ever achieved so far."
Category: Feature | Tagged: CMOS, detector R&D, vertex detector
1 February 2007The current design for the International Linear Collider (ILC) requires 576, 10-megawatt klystron tubes to supply microwave power along its 40 km linear accelerator. Each ILC klystron tube needs 120,000 volt, 140-ampere pulses, fired at a rate of five pulses per second. Each pulse delivers a total energy of more than 23 kilojoules—the kinetic energy of a 20 millimeter cannon shell.
Category: Feature | Tagged: klystron, marx modulator, SLAC
25 January 2007At the opening session of the ILC Test Beam Workshop on Wednesday, participants learned how the upgraded Meson Test Beam Facility will keep pace with the high-precision measurements required by the proposed ILC. The upgraded facility is set to be commissioned next week.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Fermilab, Meson Test Beam Facility
Elizabeth Clements | 18 January 2007Almost three years after EuroTeV (The European Design Study Towards a Global TeV Linear Collider) convened for the very first time at Daresbury Laboratory in February 2004, the collaboration met once again this past week amidst the rolling green hills and gusting gales to acknowledge programme accomplishments and discuss plans for the future.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILD, ILD Detector, Japan, KEK
Nobuko Kobayashi | 18 January 2007From 20 to 22 December 2006, the first Japanese "ILC Detector" Workshop took place at KEK. It was supported by the JSPS grant for Creative Scientific Research "Research and development of a novel detector system for the international linear collider," and about sixty participants - from undergraduate to senior researcher - from all over the country came to KEK. The main purpose of this workshop was to exchange news about the R&D status of ILC detectors and ideas on the Reference Design Report (RDR) and Detector Concept Report (DCR).
Category: Feature | Tagged: EUROTeV
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 11 January 2007Ever dreamt of saving computing time? "With the ILC Grid Virtual Organisation, I do in one day what I would do in about 100 days with my personal computer," said Olivier Dadoun, a post-doc at LAL, France.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILC Grid
Elizabeth Clements | 4 January 2007To make the superconducting cavities for the ILC sparkle, they must undergo a series of surface treatments to make them as clean and pure as possible – a necessity for achieving high accelerating gradients. Electropolishing and Buffered Chemical Polishing, the two types of chemical treatments required for the cavities, are not simple tasks. They involve tricky chemicals and a detailed recipe for producing the best cavities possible.
Category: Feature | Tagged: BCP, buffered chemical polishing, cavity processing, cavity R&D, Cornell University, DESY, JLab, KEK
Barbara Warmbein | 4 January 2007A new team of young researchers based at DESY will start building more bridges between theory and experiment and between LHC and ILC in May (next year). Philip Bechtle, currently a post-doc at the BaBar experiment at SLAC, has just received approval and a budget for his "Young Investigators Group" from the Helmholtz Association, the largest scientific organisation in Germany spanning 15 research centres, including DESY. Bechtle, one post doc and four PhD students will delve deep into the subject "Terascale Physics: From Data Taking at LHC to Understanding at ILC."
Category: Feature | Tagged: particle simulation
