Early in this new century I chaired the committee that was charged with making the difficult decision whether to pursue the design of a high energy electron-positron linear collider based on ‘warm’ (room temperature) or ‘cold’ (superconducting) cavities. Our committee made a decisive forward-looking decision to base the design on superconducting RF accelerating cavities. Springing from that […]
After many a summer – and corner…
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 […]
The new ILD structure
The International Large Detector (ILD) is one of two detector concepts which are under study for the International Linear Collider. ILD started about ten years ago with the merger of two different concept groups. The concept group developed a detector design which was documented in the ILC’s Technical Design Report TDR. Over the past few […]
How great does the ‘Great Wall’ have to be?
The question how great the (ILC tunnel’s) Great Wall needs to be was answered for the Kamaboko tunnel design at the Kitakami site by the final decision of the Change Management Board to a Change Request (ILC-CR-0012) for the 25-kilometre linear-accelerator (linac) sections of the ILC. The shield wall in the ‘Kamaboko’ shape tunnel , […]
Linear Collider Collaboration published Progress Report for the ILC
The Linear Collider Collaboration is pleased to announced the official release of the International Linear Collider Progress Report. The ILC Progress Report is a document outlining the technical progress after the publication of the Technical Design Report (TDR) in 2013. It contains the information regarding the progress in civil engineering studies, accelerator hardware design/development updates, […]
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 […]
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 […]
A year in review
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC in the last year has clarified the initial scientific objective of the Linear Collider projects. It tell us that a Higgs factory will be the first phase of the Linear Collider project. This changes the formerly mutually exclusive situation of the ILC and CLIC projects into peaceful […]
Good things come in threes
The last issue of LC NewsLine featured the two summary videos from the Asian and the European Technical Design Report handover event. Today we are proud to present part three: the summary of the Americas event that took place at Fermilab and culminated in the handing over of a gift-wrapped set of the report from […]
Worldwide video
The nature of a worldwide event happening consecutively in three regions of world is that people can only attend one of the three. So when celebrations ended in Japan and started in Europe, a video of the Asian event showed the participants in Europe what had happened during the day. Likewise, when Europe handed over […]