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Five Million Euros has Funded to Prepare Europe for the International Linear Collider
:: 03 July, 2008
The partners of the ‘ILC-HiGrade’ proposal for the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme have just started a contract for five million Euros funding over the next four years with the European Commission. ‘ILC-HiGrade’ stands for ‘International Linear Collider and High Gradient Superconducting RF-Cavities.’ One of the main objectives of the proposal is a small serial production of accelerating cavities, superconducting components made of pure niobium for the planned International Linear Collider (ILC), that reach the high technical standards needed for the planned particle physics project. Other objectives of the ILC-HiGrade proposal are the development of a possible organisation and governance for the ILC and measures to prepare for the actual construction of the machine, including a detailed study on possible sites in Europe.
Six institutions have come together for the project: DESY (Germany), CEA (France), CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), CNRS/IN2P3 (France), INFN (Italy) and Oxford University (United Kingdom). All of these have already been involved in research and development for the ILC for many years and bundle the leading expertise in Europe in accelerator development and superconducting radiofrequency (SCRF). Combined with the partners’ decades of experience in international projects and organisations and close links to governments and funding agencies, ILC-HiGrade will help in finding the best governance scheme for the project. ILC-HiGrade builds on the experience European partners are gaining with the European X-Ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL), which uses the same accelerating technology. The consortium also makes optimum use of the existing infrastructures in Europe, including the test infrastructures in place at DESY for the future XFEL and a high-tech laboratory (Supratech) of CNRS and CEA at Orsay and Saclay, France.
“ILC-HiGrade means synergy at its best,” said Eckhard Elsen of DESY, project coordinator. “This contract is a huge step forward for Europe because of the coordinated approach to the siting question and optimum use of all resources.”
“The collaboration that has already been in place for many years has received a major boost,” added Brian Foster of Oxford University, European Regional Director for the ILC’s Global Design Effort, the organisation that manages the engineering efforts and R&D programme for the accelerator. “With the funding from the European Commission we can secure a leading role for Europe in the technology development of this exciting new project.”
The ILC is a proposed particle accelerator that could help answer some of mankind’s most fundamental questions, complementing the scientific results that scientists expect from the Large Hadron Collider LHC that will start operation this summer at CERN in Geneva. Consisting of two linear accelerators that face each other, the ILC will hurl some 10 billion electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, toward each other at nearly the speed of light. It will stretch approximately 31 kilometres in length. Inside the ILC, particles will collide 14,000 times every second at energies of 500 billion-electron-volts (GeV). The current baseline design allows for an upgrade to a 50-kilometre, 1 trillion-electron-volt (TeV) machine during the second stage of the project.
The ILC is one of the projects identified by the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) roadmap as an important project for the future of science in Europe.
About International Linear Collider
The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a proposed linear particle accelerator. It is planned to have a collision energy of 500 GeV initially, and to be completed in the late 2010s. A later upgrade to 1000 GeV is possible. As of March 2008, the host country of the accelerator has not been chosen.
It will collide electrons with positrons. It will be between 30 km and 40 km long, more than 10 times as long as the 50 GeV Stanford Linear Accelerator, the longest existing linear particle accelerator.
There are two basic shapes of accelerators. Linear accelerators ("linacs"), such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), accelerate elementary particles along a straight path. Circular accelerators, such as the Tevatron, the LEP, and the under-construction Large Hadron Collider (LHC), use circular paths. While circular geometry, is preferred for hadron colliders (since particles can be accelerated over longer distances as they go around and around and that particles that do not collide on the first pass may go around and collide on a subsequent pass), it is impractical for electron accelerators due to synchrotron radiation losses.
Even if the effective collision energy at the LHC will be higher than the ILC collision energy (14,000 GeV for the LHC[2] vs. ~500 GeV for the ILC), measurements could be made more accurately at the ILC. Collision between electrons and positrons are much simpler to analyze than collisions between many quarks, antiquarks and gluons. As such, one of the roles of the ILC would be making precision measurements of the properties of particles discovered at the LHC.
The electron source for the ILC will use 2-nanosecond laser light pulses to eject electrons from a photocathode, a technique allowing for up to 80% of the electrons to be polarized; the electrons then will be accelerated to 5 GeV in a 250-meter linac stage. Synchrotron radiation from high energy electrons will produce electron-positron pairs on a titanium-alloy target, with as much as 60% polarization; the positrons from these collisions will be collected and accelerated to 5 GeV in a separate linac.
To compact the 5 GeV electron and positron bunches to a sufficiently small size to be usefully collided, they will circulate for 0.2 seconds in a pair of damping rings, 7 km in circumference, in which they will be reduced in size to a few mm in length and less than 100 μm diameter.
Tags: European Commission , ILC-HiGrade , International Linear Collider , High Gradient Superconducting RF-Cavities ,
