Director's Corner
13 July 2005
Barry Barish
This week, the "8th ACFA Workshop on Physics and Detectors at the Linear Collider" is being held in Daegu, Korea. ACFA stands for the Asian Committee for Future Accelerators. It was formed in 1996 as a result of an initiative by Professor Z. Zheng, Director of IHEP, and Professor H. Sugawara, Director General of KEK. The present chair of ACFA is Professor Shin-ichi Kurokawa of KEK.
ACFA has actively pursued its stated goal "to strengthen regional collaboration in accelerator-based science." In particular, a strong focus of ACFA is the effort toward a linear collider and Asia's role in this effort. The committee has published three formal statements regarding the linear collider, most recently on November 4, 2004, following the decision to base the design of the linear collider on "cold" technology. Although much of the work in Asia had been on "warm" technology, in that statement, ACFA lends support to the technology decision, as well as to the concept of developing a world-wide effort toward realizing the ILC.
This week, the ACFA workshop in Daegu is focused on the physics and detectors for the ILC. Defining the features of detectors for the ILC and the associated detector R&D that will be required to realize the performance goals is a crucial element in developing an ILC design capable of reaching the science goals. Toward that end, I am taking steps to bring the detector and accelerator efforts much closer together, as we proceed with the global design effort, a subject I will discuss further in a future Director's Corner.
At this week's ACFA workshop, participants are comparing three detector concepts; presenting a new effort to baseline the detectors; and discussing the ongoing work on issues related to the machine-detector interfaces. Information on ACFA and on this 8th ACFA workshop can be found at the following websites:
http://ccwww.kek.jp/acfa/
http://chep.knu.ac.kr/ACFA8/
I want to conclude today's column by announcing another important development for the GDE and ILC, the recent announcements of new chairs for both the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) and for the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC). Jonathan Dorfan has served as the chair of ICFA during the recent crucial period for the ILC, where we have made the technology choice. He will be replaced by Albrecht Wagner, of DESY. The GDE is responsible to ICFA through ILCSC, which has been chaired by Maury Tigner, during the period where the whole concept of the GDE was developed. He will be replaced by Shin-ichi Kurokawa of KEK.
We all owe a tremendous debt to the leadership provided by Dorfan and Tigner over the past few years. I would like to personally thank them on behalf of our community for their efforts. Finally, I welcome Wagner and Kurokawa. We look forward to working closely with both of them to bring the ILC another step closer to reality.