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
Barbara Warmbein | 20 April 2006In the context of actively preparing for future electron accelerators and colliders, there will be a two and a half day meeting at LAL, Orsay starting on 15 May. Three European-funded projects (CARE/ELAN, EUROTeV and Euroleap) will meet to review their present activities and to discuss the future.
Category: Feature | Tagged: accelerator R&D
Barbara Warmbein | 20 April 2006"We will all give our very best to support the ILC design effort in achieving a design that both works and doesn't waste resources," says Ferdinand Willeke, freshly-appointed chairman of the brand-new machine advisory committee - MAC. The committee is a group of 17 'wise old men' who all have a lot of experience and expertise in designing, building and running different accelerators. They come from all types of machines - LEP, the Tevatron, the LHC, HERA, SLC, PEPII, B-factories - and from all over the world. Their mandate is to review GDE accelerator activities and to assist and report to the ILC Steering Committee. They support and advise the GDE in their decision on which technologies and solutions to choose for the ILC, review their cost estimates and milestones and check whether the whole system works.
Category: Feature | Tagged: Machine Advisory Committee
Elizabeth Clements | 13 April 2006Using state-of-the-art technology, cryomodules are vessels that contain superconducting cavities in a linear accelerator. Inside the module, liquid helium cools the cavities to -271° C, only slightly warmer than the coldest possible temperature. The superconducting cavities operate at these super-cool temperatures, pumping more and more energy into the particles that are moving at nearly the speed of light inside the accelerator.
Category: Feature | Tagged: cryomodule
13 April 2006The Linear Collider Forum of America, a not-for-profit industrial forum, will hold its spring 2006 meeting at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, CA on 1-2 May. Speakers will include Barry Barish, Director ILC Global Design Effort; Gerry Dugan, GDE Regional Director for the Americas; and Jonathan Dorfan, Director SLAC. Additional speakers from the national laboratories, universities and the Department of Energy have been invited to address the group. Separate focus areas will be set up to discuss the key technology challenges of the ILC.
Category: Feature | Tagged: LCFOA
6 April 2006Because high precision measurements will be the hallmark of experiments at the International Linear Collider, the project will require a detector with highly technical components to accurately measure the properties of the emerging particles. From beam position monitors to measuring particle flow, groups of physicists at universities across the U.S. are contributing to detector designs for the ILC. A group of researchers at the University of Michigan is contributing to international studies on the charged particle tracker, a critical component that measures the trajectories of electrically charged particles as they cross a magnetic field.
6 April 2006On the week after the International Accelerator School for Linear Collider, InterAction communicators and ILC outreach committee members from all three regions will meet at KEK on 29-31 May to discuss the issues of ILC commmunications. Anyone who is interested in ILC communications is encouraged to attend. Provisioned members are InterAction, ILC communicators, regional ILC outreach committee members and industrial forum members.
Elizabeth Clements | 6 April 2006As the projected timeline currently stands for the International Linear Collider, the machine will start running in about a decade or so. While some physicists view retirement as a novel concept, ILC scientists and engineers must face the fact that the next-generation particle accelerator needs a next-generation of experts behind it. After the overwhelming response of applicants to the International Accelerator School for Linear Colliders, physicists can rest a little easier, knowing that a future generation of scientists is ready and eager to take the helm.
Category: Feature | Tagged: lcschool, linear collider school
Barbara Warmbein | 30 March 2006In a tent in a test hall at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, the hadron calorimeter is learning how to see. This calorimeter - an essential part in all proposed detector designs for the ILC - measures the energy of all those particles that make it through the dense electromagnetic calorimeter. It does this with the help of scintillators, small plastic plates where incoming particles interact, leaving information of their energies, a fibre that changes the photons' wavelengths from ultraviolet to green, and tiny photodetectors that convert the light into an electronic signal. Hadrons interact with layers of dense metal, producing the charged particles whose signal is measured and conclusions can be drawn on the energy and nature of the hadron that swooshed past.
