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Director's Corner: SLAC Has a
Unique Contribution to Make to International Linear Collider
By
Jonathan Dorfan
As many of you know, the worldwide
high energy physics community has reached an important milestone on the
path to building an electron-positron linear collider, a facility that
will unlock some of nature’s greatest mysteries.
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Photo by Diana
Rogers |
The International Technology
Recommendation Panel (ITRP), after eight months of very hard work,
recommended on August 19th that superconducting (“cold”) technology,
rather than conventional room temperature copper( “warm”) technology
developed by SLAC and its Japanese partner KEK, be used for the linacs
that will have to accelerate the electrons and positrons to record
energies of 500 GeV. ICFA, the International Committee on Future
Accelerators, which was meeting in Beijing last week, unanimously
accepted this recommendation and made it official.
The ITRP declared that both
superconducting and room temperature technologies were viable and
mature, and praised all the talented and dedicated teams which have
worked on the research and development of these technologies for many
years. A rational selection could not have been made unless both (and
actually other variations of these) approaches had been carried forward
to a mature point where an educated comparison was possible. It is
also important to understand that the ITRP recommended the cold
technology, but did not recommend a specific design (such as the TESLA
design by DESY, the German lab that developed the cold technology). The
Panel also strongly recommended pooling the resources and know-how of
the two groups, warm and cold, to produce the best possible new linear
collider design.
The decision has significant
implications for SLAC. We are certainly disappointed that our warm
technology was not selected. However, the high energy physics worldwide
community has taken a huge and necessary step forward by making this
selection, and has crossed a critical threshold in the realization of
the dream that SLAC helped initiate—building a frontier energy linear
collider.
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Back row (left to right):
FNAL Director Mike Whitherell, CERN Director General Robert
Aymar, KEK Director Yoji Totsuka, Won Namkung (ALCSC), Brian
Foster (ECFA), Giorgio Bellettini (ITRP), SLAC Director Jonathan
Dorfan, Chen Hesheng, (IHEP Beijing), DESY Director Albrecht
Wagner, Maury Tigner, (ILCSC) (Photo by Neil Calder) |
The path forward is exciting and we
remain an enthusiastic champion of the machine. As the only laboratory
to have built a linear collider, the SLAC Linear Collider, we have
expertise and experience in most areas critical to the linear collider
design. Our expertise and experience with the warm technology transfers
naturally and powerfully onto the design based on cold cavities.
This multi-billion dollar machine
can only happen if the three regions of the world (North America, Europe
and Asia) come together and pool their human and fiscal resources. We
still have to take on tough technical and organizational issues to move
the collaboration forward, to continue to show international commitment
to the collider, so as to get the support of the many governments that
are needed to fund the design and construction of the linear collider.
The International Linear Collider (ILC)
is the new name for this bold global project. All previous names (NLC,
JLC/GLC and TESLA) will be retired. The ILC will be a complex machine
with many different elements. It needs teams of people with broad
expertise. The machine will have sources to produce electrons and
positrons, damping rings to prepare the particle bunches, two main
linear accelerators to accelerate the bunches, two final focus regions,
the collision point where electrons and positrons smash into each other,
and the detectors to record the collisions.
The assessment of our worldwide
partners and the ITRP is unequivocal on one point: as we now form the
International Linear Collider design effort, SLAC, because of its past
experience and broad knowledge about linear colliders, has a unique
contribution to make. This view is shared by our government partner,
the Department of Energy.
In November 2004 we will form the
ILC collaboration at a workshop at KEK, which will bring together all
the interested worldwide partners. The collaboration will initially
proceed using the funding we have in place. By the end of the year, we
plan to identify a Director for the central design effort. This
Director will lead the Global Design Initiative, with regional
coordinators from each geographical area. After the design is
finalized, the next step will be to have one or several governments come
forward with an offer to host the facility. If all goes well, the
physics community could have a machine by 2015.
The Office of High Energy Physics in
the DOE is backing our lab very strongly to move forward. I anticipate
the same financial level of support for the ILC effort at SLAC in 2005
as we had this year. I am hopeful that, with this decision to
consolidate the worldwide effort, we could see growth in funding that
supports the ILC design in the years 2006 through 2009. We currently
have 100 full-time-equivalent staff working on the linear collider,
representing roughly half of the worldwide effort.
For a while, it will not be
completely business as usual. We do have to reorient the activities that
have been specific to our warm technology to work on the new design. The
linear collider test facility (NLCTA) here will play a different role as
we move forward. We need time to assess what will be closed out and
what will be retained. There are numerous opportunities and a lot of
work to do. SLAC is vigorously pursing a plan for our role in this
exhilarating venture.
Let me encourage you all to embrace
the ILC opportunity with enthusiasm so that SLAC can continue to be a
leader in the worldwide community as it moves toward the construction of
a machine that will reap tremendous physics benefits after it is
completed.
For the full text of the ICFA press
release, see
http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1014290.
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