Director's Corner

29 June 2005
As we look forward to the Snowmass Workshop, I want to describe events that followed the technology decision that I reviewed last week. I will also describe how the ILC design effort has been organized over the past year.

The ITRP technology recommendation was accepted by both the International Linear Collider Steering Committee, (ILCSC, chaired by Maury Tigner) and the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA, chaired by Jonathan Dorfan) during the Beijing High Energy Physics meeting last August 2004. The directors of SLAC, KEK and DESY had made clear throughout the ITRP process the commitments of their laboratories to an international linear collider, independent of the final choice of main linac technology. Following the decision, true to their word, both the SLAC and KEK laboratories rapidly reorganized their efforts toward designing a linear collider using superconducting rf technology.

This rapid convergence of the international effort culminated in a very successful first global workshop for the ILC last November 13-15 at KEK. Efforts of the 220 participants were divided into six technical working groups, organized as follows:

• Working Group 1: Overall Design
• Working Group 2: Main Linac
• Working Group 3: Injector, including damping rings
• Working Group 4: Beam Delivery Systems, including collimator, final focus, etc.
• Working Group 5: Cavity design: higher gradients, etc.
• Working Group 6: Strategic communication

This structure, including leadership appointed for each group, has functioned through the past seven months, with each working group having many projects, follow-up meetings, etc. The basic structure has continued since the inception of the GDE and forms the basis of the organization and leadership for the Snowmass Workshop. At that meeting, we will initiate an incremental and smooth transfer of the organizational responsibility from the "self-organized" phase of the ILC design effort to the GDE.

The major ILC activity this past week was a Joint ILC-European Regional Meeting and an ILC-BDIR (Working Group 4) meeting, hosted by the Oxford/RHUL John Adams Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK from 20-23 June. The BDIR workshop was part of the pre-Snowmass working group phase of the ILC design effort, and it provided an important forum for interactions between the Instrumentation and Diagnostics working groups. The newly appointed European ILC regional director, Brian Foster, addressed the meeting.