Party poopers

Party poopers

Photo: Diana Rogers, SLAC
Busloads of new Stanford graduates and their families admired the field of golden grass on SLAC's eastern-most hill on a sunny Saturday in May. But their stunned tour guides looked in dismay as they sought 50 bright red balloons.

Tied with reed

What do a 200-year-old thatched-roof house and a modern high-energy-physics laboratory have in common?

Researching the ILC

Research papers are traditionally written about data gathered in an experiment. However, research papers are also published before an experiment has even begun, and the International Linear Collider is an example.

Collisions galore

In May, Fermilab accelerator experts began to speculate about when the Tevatron collider would hit the inverse femtobarn mark, a measure of the gazillions of collisions produced since March 2001.

Collaborating at 40,000 feet

Phillipe Galvez wasn't even supposed to be on the flight. After a delay of his original flight, from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, he was placed on a flight to Munich.

Foiled car foils attempt to monopolize parking

In mid-June, Fermilab employees got a surprise as they drove through the DZero parking lot. Sitting in a prime spot in the small parking lot in front of the main building was a car, completely covered in aluminum foil and adorned with decorations.

International Linear Collider

The International Linear Collider is a proposed new electron-positron collider. Together with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, it would allow physicists to explore energy regions beyond the reach of today's accelerators.

Glen White: Becoming an accelerator physicist

First, let me come clean. I started off my research career as a particle physicist working for the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom.

ILC organization

Planning designing, and funding the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC), a 40-kilometer-long electron-positron collider costing billions of dollars, will require global participation and global organization.

Early linacs

The 1940s saw the origins of linear electron accelerators that directly led to the 2-mile-long accelerator at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. SLAC archivist Jean Deken presents a pictorial history of early linear accelerator development at Stanford University.

CLIC: The Compact Linear Collider

As the Global Design Effort for the proposed International Linear Collider starts to take shape, an international collaboration of scientists simultaneously works on an alternative linear collider technology that pushes physics and engineering to the edge.

In their hands: the future of particle physics

Particle physics is at a critical time, and its future depends on how well scientists can make their case to a diverse National Academy of Sciences panel.

Global ILC efforts

Designing the International Linear Collider is a global enterprise. Physicists and accelerator experts from around the world are collaborating to design the approximately 25-mile-long machine.

Postcards from the terascale

In February, the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation asked the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel "to form a committee to write a document" that addresses the synergies and complementarities of the Large Hadron Collider, now under constructi

Douglas Sarno: Public participation

The International Linear Collider will cost billions of dollars, paid for by taxpayers. Douglas Sarno, a consultant on public participation projects, explains that the public has a legitimate right to help shape the ILC's course.

Benn Tannenbaum: The process counts

Particle physics and politics. At first blush, it's hard to imagine two more dissimilar fields of endeavor.