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Tag archive: DESY

From DESY inForm: Together We’re Strong

4 September 2008 Faster, higher, farther! The motto of this year's Olympic Games is also valid for the development of research opportunities. But unlike the Olympic athletes who struggle to beat world records by fractions of hundredths, the development of accelerator experiments is progressing in such extreme steps that researchers have to clear completely new hurdles – their measuring instruments are too inaccurate. Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

Thirty perfect cavities: liftoff!

| 4 September 2008 There are many official stages to a project financed by the European Commission – from call, proposal, negotiations, contract draft, start of work, annual reports to one of the most official events: the kick-off meeting. Europe's new flagship project on cavity production and exploration of international governance structures, ILC-HiGrade took this step last week. Representatives form all eight work packages were at DESY to present their objectives, their to-do lists and the milestones already achieved. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

A welcome cage

| 28 August 2008 The international time projection chamber (TPC) team that works on R&D for future ILC detectors used to have a bit of a running gag. Somebody would proclaim that “the field cage will arrive next week” and everybody else would chuckle because week after week it didn’t arrive. Chuckling days are over now: after several years of planning the cage for the large TPC prototype, ordering it from industry, checking the quality, rejecting parts of the product and reordering, the nearly one-metre-long barrel with an inner diameter of 72 centimetres has finally arrived at DESY in Hamburg. First tests indicate that it will finally meet the team's high requirements. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

ECFA meets at DESY

| 31 July 2008 In their meeting a couple of days ago at DESY, ECFA, the European Committee for Future Accelerators, got a complete update on all present and future particle physics activities in Europe. They also discussed the ILC and its potential: “We think it is important to remember that particle physics in Europe is more than the LHC,” says the current ECFA chair Karlheinz Meier from Heidelberg university in Germany. “The community has to plan now, gather facts and lay foundations for future projects, and the ILC is a very good example for this.” Category: Around the World | Tagged: ,

Cryo crash test

| 12 June 2008 Particle physicists have the reputation that they need to smash things up in order to find out what they are about. Sometimes accelerator physicists get to smash stuff up, too: a group of engineers and technicians recently crash-tested a full cryomodule. They wanted to find out what the 12-metre piece of kit would look like if somebody happened to use the beam pipe as a stepladder, drive a tunnel vehicle into a flange or decide to rip out a vacuum pump. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , ,

CALICE collaboration is connected

5 June 2008 Even if you don't want to step through new control room's swish sliding doors, you can have a look inside DESY's new feature because of its doors made of glass: it is a medium-sized room with some technical interior and an ILC colour scheme. There are two computer working stations, each with four monitors and a small conference table; on a big screen you see the pictures from three webcams; and three clocks hang on the wall, showing the local times of DESY/CERN in Hamburg/Geneva, Fermilab near Chicago and KEK near Tokyo. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

On the costing trail

| 22 May 2008 Hamburg isn't exactly known for its good weather and hours of sunshine per year. So when the sun is out and nature is exploding with spring leaves and early summer blossoms, Hamburgers go to every length to spend those precious times outside. Spending a day in a conference room darkened for better presentations, hunched over microphones to listen to colleagues at the other end of the world doesn't normally rank high on the list of things to do in Hamburg when the weather is nice. Nevertheless one of the participants of last week's cost management meeting described their three days as "very enjoyable", meaning it. One has to work on the ILC to appreciate the spirit... Category: Feature | Tagged: ,

Spin doctors

| 8 May 2008 Theorists and experimentalists aren't always of the same opinion. There is one thing on which opinions aren't polarised though, and that is polarisation. Polarisation is a special characteristic of a particle bunch – a sort of measure of the particles’ combined spin – that, when studied in the right sort of detector at the ILC, is supposed to give clues and answers on phenomena like the Higgs, supersymmetry or searches for new physics and extra dimensions. To study the collisions, and also to understand polarisation better, a few groups of a total of about 30 people around the world are designing and building polarimeters that measure the degree of polsarisation of the particles before and after collisions. They have just had their first 'collaboration' meeting at DESY in Zeuthen, near Berlin, Germany. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , , , ,

Learning to accelerate

| 10 April 2008 When your day job means measuring the F2 structure function of the proton or hunting for the Higgs boson, you don't usually stop and wonder how exactly the ingredients of your events reached their collision point. Some 30 junior researchers have just learnt to do just this: at the recent 'Terascale Accelerator School', the first of its kind organised in Germany and a project of the Helmholtz Alliance, physics students turned into nuts-and-bolts accelerator experts for a week. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , ,

A horizontal challenge

| 17 January 2008 The world’s first horizontal multi-beam klystron has started its site acceptance test at DESY. Built by the Japanese company Toshiba, it is the first of three prototypes from different companies to arrive for the test that will determine whether the new klystron design works. The 10-megawatt horizontal klystron was developed for the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) and is also part of the reference design for the ILC. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , ,