Get ready for deep-dish pizza and hot dogs piled high with onions, peppers and a pickle because the 2007 American Linear Collider Physics Group and International Linear Collider Global Design Effort meetings are heading for the windy city. Fermilab, located just outside Chicago, Illinois, will host the joint ALCPG07 meeting on 22-26 October in a continuing series of workshops on the physics, detector and accelerator issues of the proposed ILC. Interested participants should register soon, as the deadline to book a hotel room is 21 September.

Take a close look at the ALCPG07 poster -- notice anything special?

This year's workshop comes during an important period in the maturing of the ILC says Jim Brau, co-chair of the ALCPG. The Reference Design Report has been completed and accepted by the ILC Steering Committee and the Funding Agencies for Large Colliders. The ILCSC nominated a Research Director to guide the development of the experimental programme, and the detector community anticipates the appointment to be announced soon. Meanwhile the detector concept groups are actively preparing Letters of Intent. “We expect these letters to be reviewed next year, with a decision on two detector approaches to develop into engineered designs, along with the accelerator,” says Brau, who is also a chair of the World Wide Study. In parallel with the ALCPG programme, he added, the WWS will conduct a review of vertex detector R&D.

Another highlight of the workshop promises to be a “Dueling Pianos” session scheduled for the evening of 23 October. Not necessarily a musical event, although rumour has it that a physicist may play a tune or two, the session will be a town hall meeting with a twist. “Music is a wonderful medium of suggestion and subtlety in which the very notions of exposition and development coexist in an uninterrupted harmony,” says Fermilab's Marcel Demarteau who organised similar successful sessions for other workshops in the past. “In a musical piece, it is the symphony of all musical moments that propagates a motif. In a similar fashion, the 'dueling pianos' session is designed to stimulate discussions on the hot topics surrounding the ILC.” Workshop attendees will submit questions ahead of time. Each question will then get forwarded to two attendees, who will be asked to prepare brief responses. Just like dueling pianos - sometimes the answers will produce harmony, while other discussions may highlight competing forces. Workshop participants may submit questions online.

During the GDE meeting, the project managers will summarise the engineering design kick-off meetings that started in August and will continue in November. The project management team is currently spending a few days at each major laboratory to review in detail the Reference Design Report and define work packages that will restructure the organisation.

A block of rooms has been reserved at the Pheasant Run Resort, located in St. Charles, Illinois. These rooms will only be held until 19 September. The deadline to register for the workshop is 12 October. “We anticipate a busy and fruitful workshop, with important progress on many fronts,” says Brau.

-- Elizabeth Clements