Time passes, it seems, increasingly quickly and it’s now more than a month since the international Linear Collider Workshop, LCWS2015, took place in Whistler, British Columbia. This marked the latest milestone in our global community’s preparations for a next-generation high-energy linear electron-positron collider to explore (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld) the ‘known knowns’, namely the physics […]
Collider facts
In Whistler, British Columbia, some two hundred physicists gathered to the annual Linear Collider Workshop. As the last speaker of the meeting, I tried to summarise the status of various collider options currently under discussion. In particular, I tried to clarify their readiness and timelines. The ILC passed the TDR (Technical Design Report) stage back […]
Crossing technical and cultural borders
EU project E-JADE fosters exchange between European and Japanese researchers
Oskar Hartbrich is a PhD student who specialises in developing state-of-the art calorimeters for future ILC detectors. He is also a specialist for full detectors simulations, and he has just spent nine weeks in Japan getting even deeper into this role, sitting side by side with other experts from Tokyo and Shinshu universities to further […]
LHC commissioning continues in spite of obstacles
It is exciting to watch the LHC operations team slowly switch the machine back on step by step, encountering problems, solving them, encountering new ones and still breaking records while getting the machine running again. It is also educational. When the linear collider goes into operation it won’t be at the push of one button […]
CALICE under new leadership
CALICE, the collaboration of detector developers working on calorimeters for the linear collider, has a new spokesperson. At their meeting during the ALCW2015 workshop, the collaboration elected Frank Simon from the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, as their new head. He takes over from Jose Repond, Argonne National Lab. The CALICE collaboration unites […]
April in Paris
“April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom Holiday tables under the trees April in Paris, this is a feeling That no one can ever reprise” Thus run the lyrics of the famous song, composed by Vernon Duke in 1932. Indeed the first Programme Advisory Committee (PAC) meeting of the LCC era was held in idyllic weather […]
Ready for the jump
The LHC’s so-called Run 2 kicks off when first beam circulate in the 27-kilometre tunnel. After a period of getting to know the consolidated and improved LHC, the machine operators think they can deliver first collisions at 13 TeV to the LHC’s experiments in late May or early June. This is a 60% increase in […]
Updating the physics case for the ILC
The physics case of the ILC has been studied intensively for many years, culminating in the physics volume of the Technical Design Report (TDR). It was followed by efforts to compare various machines such as the European Strategy studies and the Snowmass studies. Still, the scientific and political environments surrounding the ILC keep changing. On […]
Linear collider technology checks LHC lumi
There’s a piece of linear collider detector technology that is getting ready to take real collision data. The linear collider may be at planning stage, but right in the middle of the CMS detector, a luminometer based on work done for the forward region of the ILC’s ILD detector is very much a working piece […]
Back to the future
Technology transfer between FCC and ILC
This tool offers a (very large) set of parameters and geological data such as soil composition, hydrography, environmental and sociological constraints and programmable risk factors data. You play with them – key in a tilt of, say, one percent or move points north or south or put the whole thing deeper underground – and the […]