Director's Corner

1 September 2005

Barry Barish

The two-week linear collider workshop at Snowmass is now over.  Both the 2nd ILC Workshop and the 2005 International Linear Collider Physics and Detector Workshops were great successes. Holding these two workshops together proved to be a very good idea because they provided many opportunities for the accelerator and the physics/detector communities to interact (plenary sessions, noon time accelerator physics tutorials, coffee breaks, etc).  

Snowmass was a big milestone for the GDE.  It was the first time the 49 members  of the Global Design Effort met together to begin our work. The first week at Snowmass was primarily organized along the lines of the accelerator working groups that were formed last fall at the 1^st ILC Workshop.  The main GDE influence was adding six global working groups that met each afternoon to begin focusing on overall design issues such as costing, facilities, operations, machine parameters, machine detector interface, etc).  These groups made very good progress on these issues. 

After the first week of the workshop, the GDE members and working group leaders met on Saturday, 20 August, to plan the second week.  In addition to continuing the work begun in the first week, our goals for the second week were to concentrate on identifying the decisions that will need to be made to develop a complete baseline configuration and to make conclusions or recommendations on them, where possible. 

Tom Himel

Tom Himel greatly facilitated this process by assembling a list of more than 40 items, which were used to focus the discussions for the second week.  Conclusions and recommendations from each working and global group, as well as for the 'Himel List,' are being assembled and they will soon be available on our ILC Web site.  This will provide the starting point for the GDE work this fall toward a Baseline Configuration Document (BCD) by the end of the year.

So, what happens next?  Our plan is to first assemble all the information from Snowmass, post it on the Web site, and let those in the community provide additional inputs.  In mid-September, the GDE directorate (Barish, Dugan, Foster and Takasaki) and the GDE accelerator leadership (Yokoya, Raubenheimer and Walker) will meet to consider all these inputs and to begin the process of putting together a 'Strawman' BCD. 

In some cases, we expect that we will need more information, and in other cases, we may want to call on expert advice.  In any event, we plan to conduct an iterative and open process while working toward the BCD.  In mid-November, we will meet again to put together a 'Strawman' BCD, which will be posted and will provide the starting point for the next GDE meeting to be held at Frascati, Italy from December 7-10, 2006.  It is our goal to complete the baseline configuration document and alternate R&D plan at the Frascati meeting.

I want to emphasize that the GDE process of getting to a baseline configuration will be as open as possible.  We invite and encourage inputs from the broader ILC community at each step in the process, including participation by interested parties in our meetings.  You should be able to keep close tabs on our progress on the ILC Web site, where we will be putting together a special section on the BCD.