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.
Elizabeth Clements | 30 March 2006While figuring out how to smash electrons and positrons at an energy level of 500 GeV in a tunnel that is approximately 25 kilometers long could be considered a minor challenge, one of the largest hurdles for the International Linear Collider is developing accurate costing estimates. While at first estimating the cost of something might not sound that hard (some of us do it almost every day for groceries, house supplies, and of course shoes), there are a number of factors that will make costing an extremely complicated process for a global project like the ILC.
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 23 March 2006Right after the Bangalore meeting on 15 March, a fourth ILC communicator joined the Global Design Effort. Barbara Warmbein will be sharing the European duties with Perrine Royole-Degieux and will closely collaborate with Elizabeth Clements (Americas) and Youhei Morita (Asia). She is based at DESY and is taking over for Karsten Büesser. As an ILC communicator, she will write stories for ILC NewsLine and take care of the general communications business – making sure that colleagues, decision makers and eventually the public will be well aware of the exciting studies and results in the ILC community. She will also be the scientific assistant to Brian Foster, regional GDE Director for Europe, based in Oxford, England.
Category: Feature | Tagged: ILC Communicators
23 March 2006You may see thousands of stars or countless numbers of galaxies in the night sky. The universe is so vast that it would seem like just an infinite number of galaxies are out there. But in fact, what a human observes in the universe as visible light or any other form of radiation is just a fraction of what actually exists.
Category: Feature | Tagged: dark matter
