Director's Corner
8 December 2005
Barry Barish
Frascati News
This week the GDE is in Frascati, Italy. We have come together for what is only our second face-to-face meeting, following our kick-off meeting as part of the Snowmass workshop just over three months ago. The main goal, finalizing the baseline configuration, represents the successful completion of a major milestone for the GDE. More than 100 physicists have come to Frascati for this specialized and task oriented meeting.
Our goals this week are rather specific. They are to finalize the baseline for the ILC in the form of our baseline configuration document (BCD), and to organize the overall GDE and ILC efforts for carrying out the reference design and global R&D programs next year.
The BCD is a tiered electronic document giving much of the details that will be needed as we move into the design phase. If printed, it comes to more than 600 pages, and it has been on the web in the form of a 'strawman baseline' since mid-November. At that time, we invited input to the BCD on our website and have received a number of responses. In addition, we also have gotten direct inputs on aspects of the BCD and have solicited and gotten some thoughtful inputs from three independent reviewers: Katsunobu Oide (KEK), Burton Richter (SLAC) and Lenny Rivkin (PSI).
In general, it is my assessment that, once the BCD goes through final iterations this week, it will form a strong basis for the ILC reference design effort next year. The next step will be to put the BCD under 'configuration control.' This is a process that will make the BCD the official reference that will define the baseline configuration with the stability required to carry out a design and costing. Changes will be made in the configuration, but they will be proposed and approved through a formal process.
At the Frascati meeting, I am announcing a new organizational structure of the GDE for next year's efforts. Briefly, the new organization is built around three GDE Boards that will guide and monitor the ILC R&D and the design/cost efforts.
Burton Richter
The Change Control Board will be chaired by Nobu Toge of KEK. It will be responsible for holding the configuration and determining changes to the configuration, which includes defining the R&D on alternatives to the baseline. The Design Cost Board will be chaired by Peter Garbincius of Fermilab. It will be responsible for guiding and overseeing the design and cost efforts for the reference design. Finally, the Global R&D Board will be chaired by Bill Willis of Columbia University. This board will be responsible for assessing and providing guidance for the global R&D program in support of the baseline and for alternatives and other ILC related research. It will also provide guidance and priorities for the detector R&D program.
The detailed work on the ILC reference design will be carried out regionally in our various laboratories through technical area and global groups. The technical groups will carry out the design tasks for the subsystems covered by the previous working groups and the expanded set of global groups will carry out the unifying efforts across all the subsystems for vacuum, cryogenics, controls, instrumentation, etc.