Director's Corner

13 July 2006

Gerry Dugan

Vancouver Linear Collider Workshop/GDE Meeting

Today's issue features a Director's Corner from Gerry Dugan, GDE Americas Regional Director.

The first GDE meeting in the Americas region since the Snowmass 2005 workshop will take place next week on 19-22 July, as a joint meeting with the American Linear Collider Physics Group (ALCPG) at the University of British Columbia in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. Information about the workshop and a complete agenda are available online.

The meeting will bring together several hundred physicists from around the world, who are working on both the accelerator and detector aspects of the ILC. More than 150 participants have expressed an interest in attending the GDE presentations, which will be held mostly in parallel with the ALCPG sessions. There will be an introductory joint plenary session on the morning of 19 July and a closing joint plenary session on 22 July.

Vancouver Linear Collider Workshop, 19-22 July 2006

The GDE sessions will focus on the status of the Reference Design Report (RDR) and the accompanying cost estimate. The afternoon of 19 July and the morning of 20 July will be devoted to GDE plenary sessions in which the RDR Area, Technical and Global Systems Leaders will give reports on their work. This will be followed by a series of parallel working sessions on the afternoon of 20 July 20 and all day on 21 July. During these sessions, the working groups will be able to interact with each other, review their current issues, and make plans for the next steps in developing the RDR and cost estimate. Finally there will be three plenary sessions devoted to reports on the global R&D program on 22 July.

All the Area, Technical and Global Systems groups have been working extremely hard to prepare for this meeting. The goal for the meeting is to produce a relatively complete design for the major subsystems of the machine and get an initial sense for the cost. Because this is a first, preliminary look, the costs will not be made available at this time. The GDE Cost Engineers and the GDE Director will review the costs globally. We expect this review to point out areas that require further focus in the process of the design and cost optimisation of the machine. We plan to complete the process at the next GDE meeting to be held in Valencia, Spain in early November.

In planning for this upcoming workshop, the Vancouver organisers intended for the meeting format and the shared venue with the ALCPG to foster communication between ILC accelerator and detector experts. To further enhance communications, there will be a Town Hall meeting on the evening of 20 July, at which time questions may be addressed to a panel of GDE and WWS leaders. All workshop attendees have an opportunity to submit questions to the panel in advance. Please send your questions to communicators@linearcollider.org.

There will also be an ILC Communications Workshop, sponsored by the Linear Collider Steering Group of the Americas' Communications Committee, on 18 July, the day before the ALCPG/GDE meeting begins. T he goal of this workshop is define an effective communications strategy for building a consensus of support for the ILC both inside and outside the particle physics community.

Great strides have been made in the development of the ILC RDR and cost estimate since the last GDE meeting in Bangalore. The Vancouver meeting will be an opportunity for the ILC community to assess this progress and make plans for the next phase of the effort. We all look forward to an exciting and productive workshop, and thank our hosts at TRIMUF and the University of British Columbia in advance for their hospitality and hard work in organising and executing this meeting.

-- Gerry Dugan, GDE Americas Regional Director