Director's Corner
8 June 2005
Barry Barish
This is our new GDE communications web page, which we have installed on the Interactions.org Linear Collider Communication website. It represents what will become an important tool for us to inform each other and the community what is going on with the GDE. I plan to write a regular short article, "The Director's Corner," to share my personalized views of the accomplishments, developments and plans, as we work through the steps of creating the global design for the ILC.
This interim web page will be published weekly and will then migrate to and evolve into a regular part of the ILC GDE website, which we are creating. We are working hard to develop our own operational GDE website in time for the Snowmass ILC Workshop. We plan to make it the working website for the meeting. We are putting considerable effort into designing what will be an informative and functional website for the GDE. This is essential for the functioning of such a widely dispersed collaboration. To design the website, we have contracted with Xeno Media, who recently created the new Fermilab and SLAC websites, and we are involving many persons representing different parts of our ILC community in reviewing their work and progress, to ensure that we will have the features and functionality we will need. A well-designed functional website will go a long way toward helping to bridge the great distances separating those of us that need to work closely together on a daily basis to develop the ILC design.
I mentioned Snowmass. Let me emphasize the importance of our upcoming ILC Workshop. We hope to establish much of the framework for doing our global design of the accelerator, the main features and options for the detectors and the interface between the detectors and machine, etc. I would like to encourage everyone who is interested in the ILC and who can possibly attend to sign up and join us for all or part of what should be a very exciting workshop. This workshop will be the culmination of a very productive year following the technology decision. One year ago this August the ITRP made its recommendation that superconducting RF technology should be selected for the main linac of the proposed ILC and that a new global design based on that technology should be developed by the international community.
At Snowmass, we will strive to continue that process by determining as much as we can about the baseline configuration that will then become the basis of the machine we will design. There are many options and variations to consider for the various elements that will make up the ILC, beginning with the sources and continuing through the various machine components and finally to the design considerations for the detectors themselves. We will need to evaluate performance, cost and technical risk for these various options, in order to select the baseline. We also plan to selectively pursue R&D on other options not selected for the baseline that could lead to improved performance or reduced cost. There should be something for everyone at Snowmass. We will have meetings on communications, on the civil engineering, on industrialization, as well as on physics, detectors and the machine design. Come join us!