Director's Corner

17 November 2005

Barry Barish

Progress with the BCD 
Today I am going to give an update on our progress towards the Baseline Configuration Document (BCD). The major goal of the GDE this calendar year is to produce a baseline configuration for the ILC and to document it by the end of 2005. This configuration will be the culmination of a lot of very hard work, especially from the working groups that were formed at the first ILC workshop at KEK and have served us well through Snowmass and now in forming our baseline.

After Snowmass, our first goal was to quickly document the outcomes and recommendations, post them on the GDE website, invite comments, assess the results and organize the effort needed to reach the baseline. The Snowmass conclusions and recommendations for the most part were documented by early September and posted on the web. The GDE Executive Committee, consisting of Tor Raubenheimer, Nick Walker, Kaoru Yokoya, Gerry Dugan, Brian Foster, Fumihiko Takasaki and myself, met at SLAC on September 17-18. At that meeting, we assessed the results and made a work plan for the fall. This included writing assignments, reading assignments, as well as the formation of task groups to write white papers on special issues.

A lot of very good work has been accomplished and most of the elements we need to produce a tiered electronic BCD now exist. The GDE Executive Committee is meeting again this week at SLAC to assess each chapter of the BCD, make final decisions or possibly make changes, and make final preparations for this 'strawman' BCD to be released to the GDE and the broader ILC community. We expect to announce the links that will give broad open access to this draft document within the next few days.

It will then be possible for this 'strawman' BCD to be studied and critiqued in detail by the community in preparation for our GDE meeting at Frascati, Italy from December 7-9. A preliminary agenda for the Frascati meeting can be found on the ILC Website, as well as information on registration and accommodations. The GDE meeting is open and we hope to have very good participation from GDE members and from the broader ILC community.

At Frascati, we will discuss the BCD systematically with the goal of gaining a consensus. We will also summarize our R&D program and begin to do an assessment of how well it is supports our BCD. And finally, we will discuss the plans for undertaking the Reference Design based on the BCD next year, and how that will be organized.

I encourage everyone to look over our 'strawman' BCD carefully and give us feedback. Studying it will also serve as preparation for a very focused and profitable meeting at Frascati. I want to emphasize in closing that the amount and quality of the efforts before Snowmass, during Snowmass and now this fall have positioned us very nicely to produce a high quality BCD that will serve as a sound basis for our design and costing work next year.

--Barry Barish