Image credit: Bob Palmer, BNL.
As many as 340 physicists, engineers, science managers and journalists gathered in Washington DC for the first annual meeting of the global Future Circular Collider (FCC) study. The FCC week covered all aspects of the study – designs of 100-km hadron and lepton colliders, infrastructures, technology R&D, experiments and physics.
The meeting began with an exciting presentation by US congressman Bill Foster, who recalled the history of the LHC as well as the former design studies for a Very Large Hadron Collider. A special session on Thursday was devoted to the experience with the US LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP), to the US particle-physics strategy, and US R&D activities in high-field magnets and superconducting RF. A well-attended industrial exhibition and a complementary “industry fast-track” session were focused on Nb3Sn and high-temperature superconductor development.
James Siegrist from the US Department of Energy (DOE) pointed the way for aligning the high-field magnet R&D efforts at the four leading US magnet laboratories (Brookhaven, Fermilab, Berkeley Lab and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory) with the goals of the FCC study. An implementation plan for joint magnet R&D will be composed in the near future. Discussions with further US institutes and universities are ongoing, and within the coming months several other DOE laboratories should join the FCC collaboration. A first US demonstrator magnet could be ready as early as 2016.
A total of 51 institutes have joined the FCC collaboration since February 2014, and the FCC study has been recognized by the European Commission (EC). Through the EuroCirCol project within the HORIZON2020 programme, the EC will fund R&D by 16 beneficiaries – including KEK in Japan – on the core components of the hadron collider. The four key themes addressed by EuroCirCol are the FCC-hh arc design (led by CEA Saclay), the interaction-region design (John Adams Institute), the cryo-beam-vacuum system (CELLS consortium), and the high-field magnet design (CERN). On the last day of the FCC week, the first meeting of the FCC International Collaboration was held. Leonid Rivkin was confirmed as chair of the board, with a mandate consistent with the production of the Conceptual Design Report, that is, to the end of 2018.
The next FCC Week will be held in Rome on 11–15 April 2016.
• The FCC Week in Washington was jointly organized by CERN and the US DOE, with support from the IEEE Council of Superconductivity. More than a third of the participants (120) came from the US. CERN (93), Germany (20), China (16), UK (16), Italy (12), France (11), Russia (11), Japan (10), Switzerland (10) and Spain (6) were also strongly represented. For further information, visit cern.ch/fccw2015.
