Current Director's Corner archive
21 December 2006 -The Evolving ILC Design - Centralising the Injectors I report today on another design change that has resulted from our ongoing cost to performance optimisation studies, which we are carrying out before finalising the ILC reference design. -- By Barry Barish
14 December 2006 - Cost Optimisation of Wigglers for the ILC Damping Rings One of the key technical components of the ILC damping rings is the wiggler magnet, a device consisting essentially of a series of dipole magnets of alternating polarity. -- By Gerry Dugan
7 December 2006 - Parameters for the Linear Collider: An Update As we explore the possible trade-offs to make the ILC Reference Design as cost effective as possible, we have needed sharper definitions for some of the stated parameters, making us consider alternatives. -- By Barry Barish
30 November 2006 - FALC -- Whats in the Name I attended a meeting hosted by KEK Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan on 19 November of the Funding Agencies for Large Colliders (FALC), previously known as Funding Agencies for the Linear Collider. -- By Barry Barish
22 November 2006 - The Japanese Strategy of High-Energy Physics: Full Support for the ILC A community-wide consensus is inevitable to promote a big project like the International Linear Collider, otherwise the project will not be supported by other science disciplines and governments. -- By Mitsuaki Nozaki
16 November 2006 - The Evolving ILC Design: Lowering Detectors from the Surface On 2 November, right before the very successful GDE meeting that has just concluded in Valencia, Spain, we officially made another important change to the ILC baseline design. -- By Barry Barish
9 November 2006 - GDE and WWS meet at Valencia On Tuesday a momentous meeting for the future of the ILC began in Valencia. Under cloudy skies and occasional rain, the ILC family has gathered for one of its tri-annual joint meetings, reviewing progress and the status following the Vancouver meeting last July. -- By Brian Foster
2 November 2006 - Worldwide Peer Reviews for ILC Detector R&D Reaching the science goals for the ILC will require that both the collider performance and the capabilities of the detectors be consistent with the parameters set out by the ILCSC parameters group. For the ILC detectors, this will require improvements in both spatial and energy resolution. -- By Barry Barish
26 October 2006 - ILC-Americas Regional Team Looks to the Future Over the past year, in addition to contributing to the ILC Reference Design Report, the ILC-Americas regional team, ART, has focused on programme planning for the next few years. -- By Gerry Dugan
19 October 2006 - Road to the ILC Reference Design The next big goal for the Global Design Effort is to produce an ILC Reference Design Report, RDR, that will include Preliminary Costing. -- By Barry Barish
12 October 2006 - Pomp and Circumstance Last week, Sheldon Glashow of Boston University and I made a trip to Italy to receive honorary degrees in physics, Lauree ad Honorem in Fisica, from the University of Bologna. -- By Barry Barish
5 October 2006 - The Evolving ILC Design - Eliminating One Positron Damping Ring We have planned from the beginning to quickly create an initial baseline and as a result of technical developments, evolve it in time. -- By Barry Barish
28 September 2006 - Machine Advisory Committee Reviews the GDE The Machine Advisory Committee reviewed the GDE for the second time last week at KEK in Japan from 20 to 22 September. -- by Barry Barish
21 September 2006 - The Evolving ILC Design: Changing the Crossing Angles Optimising cost to performance for the ILC design is a challenging task. Our working groups have identified a number of possible design changes, motivated by large potential cost savings. -- By Barry Barish
14 September 2006 - To-Gakkai meets the ILC Science is a great achievement of human endeavour and culture. Yet sometimes people get confused about the distinction between science and foolish ideas. -- By Mitsuaki Nozaki
7 September 2006 - Developing an International Cost Estimate for the ILC Our GDE team has about a third of its membership from the Americas, a third from Asia and a third from Europe. -- By Barry Barish
31 August 2006 - Why Cost Confidentiality A central focus of the GDE at this time is determining the ILC cost in its present form. -- By Barry Barish
24 August 2006 - Revisiting the ILC Parameters An innocent looking little document entitled Parameters for the Linear Collider dated 30 September 2003 has to a large extent determined the present baseline design of the ILC. -- By Barry Barish
17 August 2006 - Happy Birthday GDE One year ago, most of the 49 newly appointed members of the Global Design Effort came to Snowmass, Colorado, for the International Linear Collider Workshop where they participated in our first GDE face-to-face meeting. -- By Barry Barish
10 August 2006 - More Reflections on VLCW06: The ILC Reference Design Last week I discussed the physics and detector part of the joint American Linear Collider Planning Group, ALCPG, and GDE workshop, VLCW06, held in Vancouver from 19-23 July. -- By Barry Barish
3 August 2006 - Reflections on VLCW06 - Physics and Detectors The University of British Columbia, located in beautiful Vancouver, was the venue of a joint American Linear Collider Planning Group ALCPG and GDE workshop, attended by 300 participants from 19-23 July. -- By Barry Barish
27 July 2006 - Building and Testing a String of Cryomodules a Task for S2 An ambitious and crucial goal of the ILC R&D programme is to build and test a string of superconducting RF cryomodules that operate at or near the design gradient. -- By Barry Barish
20 July 2006 - CERN Council launches European Strategy for particle physics A new strategy document outlining the future directions for particle physics research in Europe was approved unanimously at a special meeting of the CERN Council in Lisbon on 14 July. -- By Brian Foster
13 July 2006 - Vancouver Linear Collider Workshop and GDE Meeting The first GDE meeting in the Americas region since the Snowmass 2005 workshop will take place next week on 19-22 July, as a joint meeting with the American Linear Collider Physics Group ALCPG at the University of British Columbia in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. -- By Gerry Dugan
6 July 2006 - Demonstrating the ILC Accelerating Gradient The centerpiece of the ILC concept is the superconducting RF technology that will be used to accelerate electrons and positrons in the main linac. -- By Barry Barish
29 June 2006 - Sokendai Linear Collider Accelerator School Not long after I became GDE Director, and even before I had recruited our initial design team, I gave a plenary talk on my ideas and plans for the ILC design effort at the Particle Accelerator Conference PAC05 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. -- By Barry Barish
22 June 2006 - How Many Magnets Make a Linear Collider Magnets that steer beams around a ring-shaped accelerator, that focus particle beams and that make various optical corrections are key to building such high-energy particle accelerators. -- By Barry Barish
15 June 2006 - Able was I ere I saw Elba This famous palindrome was purportedly spoken by Napoleon when referring to his first sighting of Elba, the island where the British exiled him in 1814. -- By Barry Barish
8 June 2006 - Future Particle Physics in Asia High energy physics is a field of international collaborative efforts, both historically and today. Many non-Asian scientists from around the world are currently participating in the KEKB and neutrino experiments at KEK. -- By Mitsuaki Nozaki
1 June 2006 - FALC Grapples with its Governance Last week I attended the meeting of the Funding Agencies for the Linear Collider -- FALC -- at the INFN Headquarters in a historic building nestled in the small twisty streets near the Pantheon and Piazza Navona in the heart of beautiful old Rome. -- By Barry Barish
25 May 2006 - Einsteins Telescope One of the most intriguing features of the ILC is its potential to act as a telescope to "explore energies a trillion times that of the accelerator itself, in the ultrahighenergy realm where physicists believe that all of natures forces become one." -- By Barry Barish
18 May 2006 - New Look and New Logo Today we inaugurate a new look for the ILC website, as well as a new logo. We have strived to make our website as functional as possible, while also making it attractive. -- By Barry Barish
11 May 2006 - Baseline Damping Rings One of the more difficult decisions we made last fall was which damping ring option to choose for our baseline. No recommendation came out of the Snowmass Workshop and our damping ring working group continued to study the question through much of the fall. -- By Barry Barish
4 May 2006 - DOE and NSF Reviewers See Progress in ILC Americas Program The first review of the US R&D program for the International Linear Collider by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation was held at Fermilab from 4-6 April 2006. -- By Gerry Dugan
27 April 2006 - Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century Creating a roadmap for the future of a field has become a very important planning tool in research fields that require large instruments, like astronomy and particle physics. -- By Barry Barish
20 April 2006 - A BIG MAC Report Peer review has become a cornerstone of modern science assessments, scientific journal publishing, funding decisons and academic promotions. -- By Barry Barish
13 April 2006 - Lost in Translation Every Thursday, I get up very early, in order to chair a weekly telecon of our GDE Executive Committee. At the same moment, my colleagues are joining the call in the late afternoon in Europe and near midnight in Japan. -- By Barry Barish
6 April 2006 - The Russian Federation in Seven Days It is widely known that the Russian Federation is home to a large number of prestigious accelerator laboratories and many highly regarded accelerator scientists. -- By Brian Foster
30 March 2006 - Thanks Fumi - Welcome Mitsuaki It is my great pleasure to announce the appointment of Professor Mitsuaki Nozaki of Kobe University of Japan as the new GDE Asian Regional Director, succeeding Professor Fumihiko Takasaki. -- By Barry Barish
23 March 2006 - Integrating the Parts At the GDE meeting in Frascati last December, we approved the ILC Baseline and announced a new organizational structure for developing a Reference Design and Cost. -- By Barry Barish
16 March 2006 - Developing Partnership with India on the ILC I discussed a set of visits to government officials in India with the purpose of laying the groundwork for Indian collaboration. -- By Barry Barish
9 March 2006 - Meeting the President of India One reason for our holding a GDE meeting in India is to provide an opportunity to explore the possibility of Indian participation in both the GDE and ILC R&D program. These discussions will hopefully be a first step toward an eventual full partnership for India on the ILC. -- By Barry Barish
2 March 2006 - Bangalore Preview One year ago, during the opening session of the Linear Collider Work Shop at Stanford University, Jonathan Dorfan on behalf of ICFA read an official letter offering me the position of Director for the yet to be formed Global Design Effort. -- By Barry Barish
23 February 2006 - Energy Upgrade ...Possible upgrade scenarios to 1 TeV were discussed at length during the Snowmass Workshop last summer, but no conclusions or consensus emerged. -- By Barry Barish
16 February 2006 - Work Breakdown Structure - WBS The second meeting of the Reference Design Report group leaders was held at Fermilab this past week. -- By Barry Barish
9 February 2006 - US Budget News The Presidents 2007 budget request to Congress includes a doubling of the ILC R&D budget from 30M to 60M dollars. This is good news, indeed. -- By Barry Barish
2 February 2006 - RD Board A decade or so ago, the thought of building a TeV scale linear collider was pretty much just a romantic notion. The long extrapolations from present accelerators and from proven technologies were daunting. -- By Barry Barish
26 January 2006 - 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. -- By Barry Barish
19 January 2006 - InDiCo - Integrated Digital Conferencing One of the biggest challenges for our dispersed GDE effort is communications. This was apparent from the beginning and, as a result, I have continually emphasized the need for us to employ the most advanced electronic communications and web tools. -- By Barry Barish
12 January 2006 - Design Cost Board At Frascati, I created three boards that will become the centerpiece of the GDE organization as we now move forward from having determined the baseline for the ILC towards doing the technical design for a construction project. -- By Barry Barish
5 January 2006 - Happy New Year As this New Year begins, I would like to briefly remark on our progress and status to date, as we begin to undertake a new set of tasks and goals for 2006. -- By Barry Barish