Perrine Royole-Degieux | 26 January 2006The French ILC community held a SOCLE meeting (Seminar Oriented towards a Contribution to an Electron Linear Collider) in Lyon on 12-13 January 2006. More than 70 participants attended a review of the ongoing ILC detector R&D effort in CNRS/IN2P3 and CEA/DAPNIA laboratories. Future prospects and organisation aspects were discussed. Software tools dedicated to physics analyses and detector optimisation were also debated, in preparation for the Detector Conceptual Report, which will be delivered to the GDE by the end of 2006.
Category: Feature | Tagged: CALICE, CMOS, detector R&D, France, SiLC, TPC
26 January 2006The International Linear Collider (ILC) interaction region beam sizes and component position stability requirements will be as small as a few nanometers. Making a head-on collision with a few nanometers beams, each beam travelling across some 20 km in the linear accelerator, is a bit like colliding two baseballs -- one thrown from earth and the other from Saturn! It is important for the ongoing ILC design effort to demonstrate that these tolerances can be achieved -- ideally using a beam-based stability measurement.
Category: Feature | Tagged: test beam, testbeam
Peter Garbincius | 26 January 2006The GDE Executive Committee, Area System Leaders, and Chairmen of the Change Control and Design & Cost Boards met in the KEK Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan (19-20 January 2006). (See this weeks Director’s Corner) Technical and cost discussions included the configuration of the main linac unit, the overall machine layout, including site dependent differences, and the relationship between the Low Q (small charge per bunch, but many bunches) parameter set and the operating flexibility of the Damping Rings. The agenda and links to the presentations and discussions can be found online.
Category: Feature | Tagged: executive committee, GDE Project Managers
Perrine Royole-Degieux | 19 January 2006Since spring 2002, a working group chaired by UK theorist Georg Weiglein (IPPP, Durham) has been working out how to strengthen the interplay between the LHC and the ILC and how the physics outcome of both machines can be optimized.
Category: Feature | Tagged: IHEP
Elizabeth Clements | 12 January 2006At Fermilab, the last year was a busy one for the team that gutted out the New Muon and Meson buildings, preparing them to be test areas for the ILC and Proton Driver. Formerly known as the Superconducting Module and Test Facility (SMTF), the renovated space is now called the ILC Test Area (ILCTA -Meson Detector Building and ILCTA-New Muon). At one of Fermilab's weekly All Experimenters' Meetings in November, Paul Czarapata provided an update on the facility.
Category: Feature | Tagged: design cost board, ILCTA, linear collider school
5 January 2006As the Baseline Configuration Document (BCD) becomes semi-stabilized, the canonical mission of the Change Control Board (CCB) is to act as a body to make decisions on important changes to the baseline configuration, if and when necessary. Nobu Toge is assigned to chair this board.
Category: Feature | Tagged: change control board
Elizabeth Clements | 5 January 2006Last month in Frascati, GDE Director Barry Barish announced the establishment of the Design Cost Board with Fermilab's Peter Garbincius as chairperson. The primary role of this board is to oversee the preparation of the Reference Design Report, a document to be developed by the end of 2006, which will include a detailed design and cost estimate for the International Linear Collider.
Category: Feature | Tagged: baseline, change control board, design cost board, ILC baseline
Elizabeth Clements | 15 December 2005Some of the major recommendations discussed at Frascati include the energy upgrade, number of tunnels, curvature of the tunnel and the number of interaction regions. Kaoru Yokoya, a member of the GDE Executive Committee, outlined the recommendations made in the BCD. "The BCD concluded that a 500 GeV tunnel would be built because of its lower first stage cost.", he said. As the current recommendation stands, a 20 km tunnel would be built during the first stage of the project. An upgrade would occur in between the first and second stage of the project, bringing the machine up to an energy of 1 TeV and increasing the length of the tunnel to approximately 40 km.
Category: Feature | Tagged: baseline configuration, BCD, Frascati, GDE
Elizabeth Clements | 8 December 2005A group of universities in the United States are currently testing prototype detectors that could be used for a muon system in the International Linear Collider. With the help of some high school students from Quarknet, an educational program that brings students and teachers into the laboratories, the University of Notre Dame completed two of the eight large rectangular planes that make up the prototype detector this past summer. These planes are now undergoing tests and collecting cosmic ray data at Fermilab.
