Director's Corner

29 September 2005

Barry Barish

It is important for all of us who are developing the technologies, designs and plans for the ILC to recognize that the majority of the construction of the actual machine will be done by industry. This will be true for constructing the conventional facilities, for fabricating the superconducting RF cavities and for producing most of the other elements going into this sophisticated accelerator. For this reason, the earlier we begin our partnerships with industry the more we will be able to use industry to help us optimize our designs, and the smoother will be the technology transfer to industry.

The GDE has been involved in hosting two meetings for industry in the past month, one at Snowmass and a second meeting last week at Fermilab that was well covered in last week's ILC NewsLine. In addition, I personally saw an impressive industrial poster exhibit at DESY, during the time of the ITRP process, and early this summer I had the opportunity to give a special ILC presentation to the Japanese Industrial Forum in Tokyo. Overall, I feel we have made a very good start in developing our relationships with industry. In this weeks column, I would like to add a few more comments about the importance of industry to the ILC and to the GDE process, and also give my view of how I see our relationships with industry developing in the coming few years.

The first question I might answer is how we plan to use industry in the development of the Reference Design over the next year or so? In immediate terms, we plan to use industry to help us do some of the costing, especially for the major cost drivers. Also, integral to our strategy for making a realistic design report, we plan to develop models for how we could build the ILC and we will then cost those models. To accomplish this, we will need to have some idea as to how we might divide up responsibilities into work packages and how we would carry out these work packages. Developing such models will allow us to study different ways we might approach the construction of the ILC, and in particular how we will use industry. Finally, we will need to work with industry to do the technology transfer and to develop through industry better ways to build crucial components.

This is just the beginning of what we hope will be a long and very successful partnership with industry for the ILC. There is much for us to learn from each other, including how to approach the fact that industry works very differently in the three regions. I would like to conclude today by welcoming the new industrial organization, the Linear Collider Forum of the Americas (LCFOA) and their President, Ken Olsen, as they join their European and Asian counterparts.