The SiD detector concept collaboration met at SLAC from January 28 to 30. This meeting was planned last October at the ALCPG07 meeting at Fermilab, as part of the preparation for the Letter of Intent (LOI).

Graphic from an engineering study of SiD on beamline. (credit: Marco Oriunno, SLAC)

After the news about budget reductions, especially for ILC activities, in December last year in the UK and US, there was considerable discussion within SiD whether to have this meeting or not. In the end we decided to proceed as planned because the call for LOIs still exists and SiD wants to prepare an LOI.

The attendance of the meeting was of course affected by the budget reductions. About 40 people attended the meeting in person at SLAC and another 30 remotely via WEBEX. All plenary and parallel sessions were available for attendance via WEBEX. The workshop opened with a welcome from SLAC Associate Director Steve Kahn, assuring the audience that SLAC intends to continue support for detectors for the ILC. Barry Barish, the GDE director, then outlined the revised plans of the GDE, in response to the funding cuts in the UK and US. This was the first presentation of the new path for the GDE, given to a detector concept group. Jim Brau then outlined the plans of the ILC Experimental Research Directorate, including the call for LOIs and how it is affected by the changes in the GDE plans and schedule. There was quite a bit of discussion after these two presentations.

The rest of Monday was devoted to plenary sessions with status reports of activities within SiD summarising where those efforts are with the preparation for the LOI. In a talk on optimising the SiD global parameters, Marty Breidenbach noted that the Pandora PFA algorithm confirmed that SiD's baseline looked reasonable, but said “We desperately need to prove this!” Tuesday was a continuation of this with a set of parallel sessions as well. The new SiD Engineering Group showcased progress with the calorimeter designs, forward systems, and detector access. The meeting closed with several subsystem summaries and an overview of IP and bunch parameters for different linear colliders by Andrei Seryi. This was followed by a panel discussion on LOI plans for each of the subsystems. In the "What Next?" discussion after this, we had a wide ranging discussion of the SiD plans for the LOI, what the LOI means, what "validation" of the LOI means etc.

In summary, the SiD Concept remains committed to summarising and writing up the work that has been done, continuing with optimisation, conceptual design, and benchmarking studies, and submitting an LOI to the Research Director in the time scale of March 2009. In his closing remarks Harry Weerts, Argonne, said: “This has been a sobering meeting, but despite some bad news, we have heard an impressive amount of progress. SiD remains one of the detector concepts for a Linear Collider and we will submit an LOI.”

-- Harry Weerts and John Jaros