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Tag archive: KEK

New year – new office

| 29 November 2007 If you talk about next year, devils will laugh at you. This is a Japanese saying that corresponds to the English saying, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." I do not want to be laughed at by the devil, but I would like to write about Building 2 at KEK. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ,

Building Understanding

| 2 August 2007 Every month, a lot of Asian researchers come to KEK to conduct their research or experiments. “We have had 45 visitors for fiscal year 2007 so far, including ten Korean researchers,” says Tomiko Shirakata, secretary at KEK’s Linear Collider Project Office. Shirkata is in charge of KEK’s visitors programme activities and provides all visitor supports such as arranging logistics, dealing with the consulate service for visa applications, and giving tips on how to spend days off in Japan. KEK launched the visitor programme in April 2006 aiming to facilitate the foreign researchers’ activities in Japan, especially for Asian researchers and students, who may have difficulties to conduct research overseas for some country-specific reasons. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , ,

A night of wonder

| 26 July 2007 Men and women wearing gaudy dresses, looking for customers under garish neon signs – this is a common sight in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku, a famous entertainment and red-light district in Tokyo, Japan. Walking down an alleyway that has countless bars and nightclubs, you will see a hand-written sign posted on the billboard of a shabby building that says, “The Accelerator’s Night 3.” Category: Around the World | Tagged: ,

Mapping a magnet

| 26 July 2007 Three pairs of eyes cast one last look around the room. Have all scissors, ladders, metallic tables been removed? No pins or pens lying around anymore? Once the team is sure that nothing is left in the area, they close the security doors and give the go-ahead – the magnet that has been to space can be charged for the first time since its arrival at its new home in the DESY test beam. Before its field of 1 Tesla can bend the tracks of particles in a EUDET detector prototype, however, the scientists have to map the field very precisely. And they don't want steel-capped boots flying into the coil. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Akira Yamamoto – A man of calm and expressions

| 12 July 2007 Newly appointed as one of three ILC project managers, Akira Yamamoto is a scientist working at KEK specialising in superconducting magnet development. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: , , ,

Collaborating for the beam

| 5 July 2007 When the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) group at KEK decided to upgrade their beam position monitor system in 2005, Marc Ross had a solution. Based at SLAC at the time, he was a longtime collaborator with KEK and familiar with the instrumentation systems used throughout Fermilab’s accelerator complex. In 2006, Ross became the head of Fermilab’s Technical Division and could see how to continue his initiated beam position monitor upgrade efforts at the ATF damping ring. Called Echotek boards, these digital signal processing based systems offer a higher resolution potential – a characteristic that allows physicists to see more details about the beam. As it turned out, Fermilab was willing to make several Echotek boards available for testing the ATF system. Hence a new collaboration was born. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , , ,

KEK and Fermilab: Strengthening collaborations

| 26 April 2007 Two of our principle collaborating institutions in the ILC are KEK Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan and Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. This week the KEK Director General, Atsuto Suzuki, came to Fermilab to discuss increased collaboration. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: , , ,

STF – Getting ready for the experience

| 1 March 2007 An important prerequisite for building the ILC is to establish the design and manufacturing of major and vital components, such as cryomodules for the main linacs through realistic operating conditions. The Tesla Test Facility (FLASH) at DESY and Fermilab’s ILC Test Area have been pursued to play critical roles in the European and American regions to this end. KEK also aims to serve as an Asian regional center for the main linac technology, and their STF (Superconducting RF Test Facility) and R&D programs are a manifestation of its endeavour. Many members of STF from KEK are active members in the GDE and in close collaborative relationships with colleagues from DESY, INFN, Orsay, FNAL, JLab, Cornell and SLAC. Major laboratories from China, Korea, and India, have expressed their interests or have already begun interactions with the programme at STF in various forms also. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

EuroTeV Looks Ahead to the ILC Engineering Design Phase

| 18 January 2007 Almost three years after EuroTeV (The European Design Study Towards a Global TeV Linear Collider) convened for the very first time at Daresbury Laboratory in February 2004, the collaboration met once again this past week amidst the rolling green hills and gusting gales to acknowledge programme accomplishments and discuss plans for the future. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Argonne-Fermilab BCP System Coming Together

| 4 January 2007 To make the superconducting cavities for the ILC sparkle, they must undergo a series of surface treatments to make them as clean and pure as possible – a necessity for achieving high accelerating gradients. Electropolishing and Buffered Chemical Polishing, the two types of chemical treatments required for the cavities, are not simple tasks. They involve tricky chemicals and a detailed recipe for producing the best cavities possible. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , , , , ,