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
4 May 2006When Albrecht Wagner, Chairman of the DESY Directorate, opened his mailbox in the morning of 27 April and found an email about FLASH’s 13.1-nm success, he replied immediately: "This is exciting and fantastic news! Congratulations to the entire team!" FLASH, DESY’s pilot facility for the future European XFEL, produced the shortest wavelength yet. This success was celebrated with a party in DESY’s accelerator control room the night before at 22:10 h. Already after three hours, when the superconducting TESLA Test Facility Linac, equipped with five accelerator modules, reached the designated energy of 700 MeV, the electron bunches that traversed the undulator emitted laser flashes with a wavelength of only 13.1 nm (there’s a plot from the logbook for those who don’t believe it). This is an important step on the way to reach the design value of 6 nm planned for the FLASH facility. With the sixth module which will be installed in the second quarter of 2007, it will be possible to accelerate the electron bunches to 1 GeV and to generate wavelengths of 6 nm.
Category: Feature | Tagged: DESY, FLASH, XFEL
Elizabeth Clements | 27 April 2006At a time when the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to start up in 2007 and the Tevatron at Fermilab will shut down by the end of this decade, the particle physics program in the United States is at a crossroads. Should the United States fold its cards and determine that the field of particle physics has lost its steam? Or should the United States step up to the plate and prepare to submit a bid to host the next-generation particle accelerator? These are the questions that the National Academies’ National Research Council charged the Committee on Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st century (EPP2010) to answer, asking the 22-member panel to lay out a 15-year plan. Yesterday on 26 April in the National Academies’ Keck Center in Washington D.C., EPP2010 launched their much-anticipated report, "Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time – Charting the Course for Elementary Particle Physics."
Category: Feature | Tagged: EPP2010
