ICFA releases GDE Reference Design Report for the ILC

The ILC will use 16,000 superconducting cavities to accelerate the electrons and positrons to extremely high energies.

Beijing, China - The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) today announced the release of the Reference Design Report (RDR) for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a proposed future particle accelerator.

Hurling some 10 billion electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, toward each other at nearly the speed of light, beams in the ILC will collide 14,000 times every second at extremely high energies - 500 billion-electronvolts (GeV). These spectacular collisions create an array of new particles that will answer some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, such as the origin of mass, dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions and beyond. The current 31-kilometre design allows for an upgrade to a 50-kilometre, 1 trillion-electronvolt (TeV) machine during the second stage of the project. Organised by the Global Design Effort (GDE), a team of more than 60 scientists, the ILC is an international endeavour that brings together more than 1000 scientists and engineers from more than 100 universities and laboratories in over two dozen countries.

Together with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scheduled to start operating in 2007, scientists believe that the ILC will answer some of science's greatest remaining questions about the nature of the universe. With its high energy electron-positron collisions that provide very precise data, the ILC will give scientists the information they need to understand the Higgs mechanism, examine supersymmetric particles, probe dark matter candidates and possibly find a way to reunite laws of nature by discovering new forces. The scientific importance of both the LHC and the ILC have been stressed by such influential reports as "Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time: Charting the Course for Elementary Particle Physics" and "The European Strategy for Particle Physics."

Snow calls: They answer

Plow-equipped pickup trucks are a key part of Fermilab's snow-removal procedures.

When Tuesday's snowfall began, Roads and Grounds hit the ground plowing--and salting, sanding and shoveling. "Our guys were out there almost immediately when we saw the snowflakes," said Roads and Grounds Group Leader Dave Shemanske. Tackling the snow was a force of 16 full-time people, and four on-call people, using four large salt trucks, plows on pickup trucks and good old hand-held equipment and shovels.

Crews rotated through lunch time when the snow and traffic were heaviest. Some crews stayed through the afternoon rush hour "to make sure everyone got out of here," Shemanske added, with a small contingent staying as late as 8 p.m. Then another full-scale effort began Wednesday morning at 4 a.m. "It was just supposed to be a dusting, but it lasted from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m.," Shemanske said. "Usually when it's this cold, you don't have a high pressure system coming in with a snowstorm. But this time it did. We're always paying close attention to the weather. We have to."

Fermilab also has a special winter team that is available 24/7, and you can read about all the jobs they handle next week in Fermilab Today.

Preparing for the Large Hadron Collider

Close to 300 members of the WLCG collaboration attended a recent workshop at CERN. Those in attendance represented 27 countries and 86 sites. Image courtesy of Will Venters.

Processing data for the Large Hadron Collider, the next-generation particle accelerator under construction at CERN, Switzerland, is one of the driving forces for development of grid technology.

The task of processing the 15 petabytes of data the LHC is predicted to generate each year falls to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Collaboration, which recently met at CERN for a week-long workshop in preparation for the start-up of the LHC later this year.
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PhysOrg.com,
February 5, 2007:

A test for new physics, including string theory

Detractors of string theory have been deriding it for years, claiming that there is no way to test it. However, with a paper published in Physical Review Letters titled "Falsifying Models of New Physics via WW Scattering", that could change. Coauthors Jacques Distler at the University of Austin in Texas, Benjamin Grinstein from the University of California, San Diego, and Rafael A. Porto and Ira Z. Rothstein at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, address a way of falsifying some models of string theory in their Letter.
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