Director's Corner

2 March 2006

Barry Barish

Bangalore Preview

One year ago, during the opening session of the Linear Collider Work Shop (LCWS05) at Stanford University, Jonathan Dorfan on behalf of ICFA read an official letter offering me the position of Director for the yet to be formed Global Design Effort. I accepted and proceeded to give a brief talk to those assembled on how I proposed to approach the challenge lying before me. Now, one year later and again at LCWS, but this time in Bangalore, India, the GDE is well underway and is holding its third meeting.

What can we look forward to at this meeting? First, by holding this meeting in conjunction with the LCWS meeting, we will provide fertile ground for having interactions between the ILC accelerator design team and the scientists working toward such a machine. Our host and local chair for this meeting is Rohini Godbole, an energetic particle theorist, who specializes in studies of the physics potential at the next generation of high energy colliders. Rohini rightfully deserves to be proud of her recent and very informative book on supersymmetric particles, "Theory and Phenomenology of Sparticles,"written with co-authors Manuel Drees and Probir Roy and published in 2004 by World Scientific.

The venue for this joint LCWS / GDE meeting is the Indian Institute for Science (IISc) in Bangalore, a unique institution in India that is different from National Laboratories, having specific missions and working with Universities to have an emphasis on education. IISc was founded about a century ago as a place dedicated to pursuing the forefront areas of research. It has established itself as an internationally renowned institution that has played host to many famous scientists.

The first meeting of the GDE was an organizational meeting at the Snowmass ILC workshop last summer. We held our second meeting in December at Frascati, Italy, where we established our ILC baseline configuration.The focus of our third meeting at Bangalore will be on the next step -- the design and costing efforts and will provide the opportunity to measure how we are doing in developing a 'reference design' based on the Baseline Configuration Document (BCD).

Highlights of the Bangalore meeting will include an initial joint GDE and LCWS plenary session covering reviews of the science, the detectors, and the GDE, as well as reports on international planning for particle physics. Finally, we look forward to a special presentation, by Greg Loew, who will give us his personal perspective on the historical developments that have led up to the present global ILC effort.