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Director of Global Design Effort Announced at
International Linear Collider Workshop
By Heather Rock Woods
The 2005 International Linear Collider Workshop kicked off March 18 by
announcing the director for the newly formed Global Design Effort (GDE)
for the proposed electron-positron collider.
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Barry Barish
(Caltech) with SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan. |
Jonathan Dorfan (DO), in his capacity as the head of the International
Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), formally offered the job to
Barry Barish, a Caltech professor of physics, during his speech
welcoming the 370 participants. Barish, scheduled to speak next,
accepted the job. He explained that the design effort will be a
distributed one, not centralized in one location.
“Why do I feel this is
the right approach?” Barish said. “For one thing, we in particle physics
know how to work this way. I believe it’s the best approach to get the
right people involved in the GDE, allowing them to contribute their
expertise and capabilities without changing where they live. Although I
am an American and I live in America, my job, and the job of the GDE, is
to respond to the international ILC community.”
The workshop was
hosted by SLAC and sponsored by the World Wide Study for future e+e-
Linear Colliders. It was the eighth in a series of workshops going back
14 years that have been devoted to the physics and detectors associated
with electron-positron linear colliders.
Last year, the
workshop took place on the Left Bank of Paris. This year, the
conversations occurred in Palo Alto, at Stanford, and on a dinner cruise
on the San Francisco Bay.
Barish’s appointment
is just one of the major steps taken since the Paris meeting last April.
Other milestones include: the choice of superconducting (cold)
technology, christening the project with the name International Linear
Collider (ILC), the first ILC collaboration meeting on accelerator
design (in Japan last November), and the initiation of meetings between
representatives from international funding agencies to discuss advancing
the project.
During the workshop, 15 working
groups tackled the nitty-gritty physics and detector issues—from beam
polarization and calorimeters to Higgs and supersymmetry searches.
“A lot of detailed
work was done in the working group sessions to design the detectors,
address the interface between machine and detector, and do the physics
calculations to support the detector design and sharpen the physics case
for the machine,” said local organizing chair JoAnne Hewett (THP).
A new working group
made its debut this year. The cosmology connections group is looking at
the substantive ways ILC could measure the properties of dark matter.
“When you know the properties of dark matter, then you can make
comparisons with cosmological observations,” Hewett said.
In addition, three
major international detector efforts gathered steam at the meeting. The
three efforts correspond to different detector concepts rather than
different geographical regions.
Dorfan wrapped up the
meeting by emphasizing the discovery potential of the ILC. “The
scientific terrain is vast and uncharted,” he said. “Keep up the pace,
keep up the momentum—the scientific imperative is compelling.”
ILC physicists had
been meeting internationally every 18 months to two years, and each
geographical region (Asia, the Americas and Europe) met twice a year.
From now on, regional and international meetings will be held annually.
The next stop for the
ILC community: Snowmass, Colorado, where a two-week workshop this summer
will welcome both the accelerator (machine) community and the detector
and physics community.
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