Director's Corner
13 November 2008
 Barry Barish |
Formalising the CLIC-ILC collaboration
Collaboration between our ILC R&D and design work and the parallel effort towards the CLIC concept stands to be of benefit to both groups. This direction also promises to help break down barriers between the two groups, making the worldwide effort towards a linear collider more integrated and unified. Of course, the underlying concepts are fundamentally different and affect much of the rest of the design: for acceleration in the main linac, the ILC uses superconducting RF, whereas CLIC accelerates through a drive beam. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of mutual interest in other areas and we have formed five working groups that are already well underway and two more working groups are being set up. We have now taken the step to formalise the mode of our collaboration, especially regarding guidelines for communication outside the collaboration. This will help enable the joint work to go forward and be used in ways agreeable to both groups.
 Jean-Pierre Delahaye, CERN CLIC study leader |
As pointed out in our recent Programme Advisory Committee (PAC) review that I reported on last week: "The PAC views very positively the recent start of common activities between the ILC and CLIC on many items such as conventional facilities, beam delivery system, detectors, physics, cost estimation, etc. This avoids unnecessary duplication of effort, and keeps the particle physics community focused on the goal of a linear collider as the next major new facility for the field."
As we look to the future, we anticipate that LHC results will establish the scientific case for a linear collider. If the science warrants a 0.5 to 1.0-TeV ILC, the agreement for joint ILC/CLIC work will be helpful towards our primary GDE goal of being ready to propose a solid project at that time. If the LHC results indicate the need for a higher-energy lepton collider, we will be prepared as a community to aggressively continue to develop the CLIC concept on a longer timescale.
The newly agreed joint statements are given below:
 CLIC/ILC Joint Statements |
-- Barry Barish