In the last Director’s Corner, Harry Weerts told us about the changes to the Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC) that had been agreed by the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) at its meeting in Chicago last month. I fully support these changes; indeed I recommended many of them in a previous Director’s Corner. One of […]
Ten Years and Counting…
Former GDE Director Barry Barish revisits the project he led for eight years
Many of the striking advances in particle physics during the particle collider era have resulted directly from the complementarity of hadron-hadron and electron-positron colliders. Unfortunately, it is not practical to build a complementary circular electron-positron collider for the LHC capable of reaching center-of-mass energies of about 1 TeV (tera electronvolt) because of the large amount of […]
Costing the ILC Technical Design Report
For a very large potential project like the ILC, costs are obviously a very big issue. Reliably costing such large projects with ambitious new technologies, in advance of having a detailed technical design and implementation plan, is a real challenge. In addition, costing is done differently in different countries, making it particularly difficult to provide […]
Extending the energy reach of the ILC
The GDE design for the ILC as presented in the Reference Design Report (RDR) is for an electron-positron colliding beam facility having a maximum centre-of-mass energy of 500 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). No design or upgrade path to 1 teraelectronvolt (TeV) was presented in the RDR. However, the option to upgrade to higher energies was explicitly maintained […]
Thanks, Peter!
In 2005, I appointed three cost engineers, Wilhelm Bialowons (DESY), Tetsuo Shidara (KEK) and Peter Garbincius (Fermilab) to work together to develop the methodology and to perform an international VALUE costing of the reference design for the ILC. Peter and his cost engineering colleagues did an outstanding job of costing the ILC as a global […]
Baseline Assessment Workshops
Director’s Corner 27 May 2010 Barry Barish Baseline Assessment Workshops Over the past months we have developed a process for assessing the major changes to the ILC baseline that were proposed last year. The motivation for the proposed changes is to evolve the ILC design to better optimise cost to performance to risk, with special […]
Evolving the ILC baseline
Director’s Corner 14 January 2010 Barry Barish Evolving the ILC baseline Over the past year, the ILC project managers have led a focussed effort to assess the ILC baseline configuration that is documented in the Reference Design Report (RDR) and as a result have developed a set of proposed baseline changes that are aimed at […]
The Reference Design Report is now official
Director’s Corner 18 October 2007 Barry Barish Frosting on the cake Today we mark the conclusion of the Reference Design Report phase of the International Linear Collider Global Design Effort with the release of our document, The International Linear Collider: Gateway to the Quantum Universe. This new document is a companion to our four-volume technical […]
Report from Beijing: The ILC Reference Design Report
Director’s Corner 8 February 2007 Barry Barish Report from Beijing: The ILC Reference Design Report The GDE’s first major goal was to define the basic parameters and layout for the ILC and document them in a Baseline Configuration Document (BCD). We achieved this at the first GDE meeting held at INFN, Frascati, Italy, in December […]
RDR Kick-off
Director’s Corner 26 January 2006 Barry Barish RDR Kick-off Our major theme for the past six months has been to establish a basic “configuration” for the International Linear Collider. The GDE process got underway last August at Snowmass and culminated in our approval of a “strawman” configuration at a meeting in Frascati, Italy in December. […]