There are prototypes and there are prototypes. Some are needed to verify that a chosen detection technology actually works, some help scientists test one technology against another, some help them design sturdy detector infrastructure with little material budget, working power supply and cooling, while others set out to prove that it is possible to have […]
An eye on the pulse
Building a state-of-the-art particle detector requires several steps. When you’ve decided what you want to measure, you have to decide which is the best, fastest and most reliable technology to make these measurements. When you’ve shown that your chosen technology can actually measure things to the specific requirements, you have to show that you can […]
Of complete DBD drafts, reviews and the future
The draft of the Detailed Baseline Design report (DBD) of ILC physics and detectors is complete and has been submitted to the Project Advisory Committee (PAC) of the ILC Steering Committee (ILCSC) for review. This report presents the achievements of physics and detector R&D activities during the Letter-of-Intent process (LOI) since 2007. It summarises the […]
A trip down main linac lane
There aren’t many people in the world who can say of themselves that they have walked the whole length of the ILC’s accelerator tunnels and stood in the detector cavern looking up at the ILC detector. In fact, there’s probably only one person in the world who has done all this: Benno List. He is […]
Make no assumptions
A linear collider would complete the picture
Collisions in the LHC are like fireworks. At energies no other particle collider has ever reached, protons smash into protons and produce such exciting particles as the Higgs boson. The catch: many, many things go on at these collisions, and filtering out the interesting ones is possible, but hard. What is more, LHC physicists can […]
ILC physics and detector programme sees progress in Kyushu
On 22 May, a small room at Kyushu University’s Hakozaki campus was crowded with journalists and local officials of the Kyushu area. A press briefing was held one day before the starting day of lively discussions on one of the detector concepts for the International Linear Collider, the ILD workshop. “I appreciate the media’s interests […]
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 […]
Design report in the making: drafting the DBD
The year 2012 will be very busy and exciting. The main task for the ILC physics and detector community is to complete Detailed Baseline Design (DBD) report summarising our effort since 2007. It will consist of two volumes: the physics volume and the detector and simulation volume. The recent news from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider […]
The impact of ILC detector R&D
This month's Research Director's Report was written by Marcel Demarteau, chair and convener of the ILC Detector Common Task Group
Although the actual construction date of the ILC accelerator and its detectors is very uncertain, the impact of the R&D for ILC detectors is very real. We are so immersed in our day-to-day activities, in the analysis of physics and test beam data, in our struggles to obtain funding, that we tend to overlook the […]
ILD collaborators make progress on detector design options
The creation of a detector blueprint draws on diverse resources: physics cases, engineering choices, computational capacity and human drive. The Detailed Baseline Design Report (DBD) is slowly but steadily appearing on the horizon, and it will reflect the weaving together of these elements to present the best realistic manifestation of ILD. After the Letters of […]