ILC NewsLine
Not like in the movies
NewsLine has 1850 suscribers - that means at least 1850 readers with at least 1850 opinions. We would like to give you the opportunity to share your opinion with others and have created this section in NewsLine: Readers Write. Karsten Buesser (DESY) kicks off this new forum with a letter about the feature story 'ILC physicists build their dream house' published on 11 October. Send us an email if you want to be next!

First of all I agree completely with the major part of your story and I enjoyed a lot the description of the workshop discussions. However I am not quite happy with your introduction. Though it gives a nice analogy of things which really also can happen in engineering design efforts for detectors and accelerators, I fear it somehow transports the wrong message. One could get the impression that the ILC physicists live in their dream world designing unrealistic and expensive detectors without taking care of the engineering and financial reality.

The detector concepts under study have undergone several steps of realistic engineering. Most of the concepts have also done engineering studies on detector halls which in some cases were much more detailed and on higher engineering design level than the common ILC detector hall is now.

The major reasoning behind IRENG was, that we all (machine and detector people) have to tackle together a new problem which has never been tried before, i.e. the push-pull approach. And this problem really requires a joined effort, which IRENG was a beautiful example of.

-- Karsten Buesser, DESY