(Photo by Diana Rogers)

by Jonathan Dorfan

The celebration of SLAC’s 40th Anniversary was a wonderful event. It gave us the opportunity to showcase SLAC’s remarkable achievements but also demonstrated our ability to organize a major event efficiently and imaginatively. Everyone was impressed by SLAC’s spirit and vitality. Senator Boxer’s field representative said that ours was one of the best-organized events she had attended in a long time, and added, "and I do this for a living!"

I was delighted that such a large fraction of our staff attended the event. As I made clear in my speech, the success of the laboratory is principally due to the excellence of our staff. I hope you all enjoy the 40th Anniversary photo album and I encourage you to visit the 40th Anniversary web site (http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/40years/) where you can see the whole event on video and read the wonderful letters of congratulation.

Many of the leaders of the particle physics community, and of the agencies that fund it, who gathered at SLAC for the 40th Anniversary, came together again only a week later at CERN in Geneva for a weeklong workshop sponsored by the International Committee for Future Accelerators. This important meeting takes place every three years to take stock of the activities in particle physics labs worldwide and to look forward to future projects.

The dominant subject of the meeting, the construction of a new Linear Collider, is important to all of us at SLAC. I am pleased to say that the project is gathering momentum. Greg Loew presented the first findings of the Linear Collider Technical Review Committee that has studied the different technical options for the accelerator. Greg and his colleagues were congratulated by the conference delegates for their excellent job that has laid the foundation for the final decisions on the technical design of the accelerator. There was also a meeting of the International Linear Collider Steering Group that has been set up to prepare the ground for not only technical choices, but also promoting political support and eventually decisions on the site of the new accelerator.