The question how great the (ILC tunnel’s) Great Wall needs to be was answered for the Kamaboko tunnel design at the Kitakami site by the final decision of the Change Management Board to a Change Request (ILC-CR-0012) for the 25-kilometre linear-accelerator (linac) sections of the ILC. The shield wall in the ‘Kamaboko’ shape tunnel , […]
Field trip to a model lab
A delegation from Kesen-Numa City, from Japan, led by the Mayor Mr. Shigeru Sugawara, visited CERN and the area around it from 18 to 20 May. The group consisted of 16 representatives from the city’s Council, the Commercial and Industry Association, the Board of Education, the Reconstruction and Policy Planning Division and many other official bodies. […]
In preparation for LCWS 14
One of the challenges involved in an international project is that of maintaining good communication among the collaboration members. While the detector community has learned over the years to adapt to this situation, typically accelerator design has been centred at a host laboratory that provided the technical leadership. The ILC design team with its global […]
The two detector concepts for the ILC
Since the inception of the ILC design effort, we have been developing the concepts for detectors to do the science as an integral part of our work. The interactions between the accelerator and the detectors are complex and demanding. For that reason, we have a group of accelerator and detector experts working together on machine-detector […]
If the particles won’t come to the detector…
Experts on detector, machine-detector interface and civil engineering agree on detector hall design
Sometimes big things have to move in the way of small things to find exciting things. The ILC detectors, for example. True to the scientific principle of reproducibility of results, two detectors, ILD and SiD, will one day record what happens when electrons and positrons collide so that one can verify (or not) what the […]
Baseline Technical Review 4 – conventional and unconventional facilities
The fourth Baseline Technical Review, held at CERN on 22 and 23 March, focused on conventional facilities and siting. All significant changes to the 2007 Reference Design Report (RDR) baseline were reviewed and evaluated for impacts on performance, cost and related systems. This was the last of the formal reviews of the Technical Design Report […]
Building a home for the ILC detectors
This month's Research Director's Report was written by Karsten Büßer (DESY), Convener of the Machine-Detector Interface Common Task Group
If you are planning to build a home for your family, there is an important ingredient that you will need: translucent paper. Sooner or later in the planning stage, you will have the first blueprints from your architect, and if you are lucky, they already represent to a large fraction what you imagined your new […]
Proposing a fishcake shape
Kamaboko is a type of Japanese fishcake with a distinctive loaf shape, usually served sliced thin with dipping sauce such as soy sauce and wasabi or as a topping for noodles. So what does kamaboko have to do with the ILC? It is the shape of the newly proposed ILC tunnel design for an Asian […]
Concrete plans for a platform
Pushing and pulling a detector on its platform brings technical challenges
Setting the stage for a particle collision event requires orchestration of Wagnerian proportions. Part of the production for the International Linear Collider involves perfectly positioning giant, unwieldy detectors in the particle beamline to capture data from electron-positron collisions. Recently ILC collaborators agreed that steel-reinforced concrete platforms would be used to steadily and nimbly move the […]
Linear collider scientists tour the Mont Blanc tunnel
Tiny particles, producing brilliant collisions as they race around an underground tunnel, are the stars of an accelerator. It’s easy to forget that people, too, must make their way around the tunnel, and that their protection merits as much attention as do flying bits of matter. A group of scientists and engineers at the International […]