A strong physics case has been made for building and electron-positron linear collider with an energy range from 90 GeV up to about 1 TeV.
It was presented on 23-24 March at the TESLA Colloquium at DESY and is documented – along with a detector design – in the third volume of the TESLA Technical Design Report (the “TDR”; see DESY report 2001-011, ECFA report 2001-209).
That volume, along with the detailed supporting notes that go with it, was produced by members of the Second ECFA/DESY Study of Physics and Detectors for a Future Electron-Positron Collider, drawing on contributions from physicists from throughout Europe and around the world. Now the mandate to the study from the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) has been extended for another two years, until spring 2003.
The goals of the extended study are:
- to continue to build up the active community of experimenters, theorists and machine physicists who prepared the TDR, in order to be ready to make firm proposals by 2003 for a funded programme of linear electron- positron physics up to about 1 TeV, if it is agreed to go ahead;
- to complete and extend feasibility studies on important physics channels;
- to review the detector’s design in the light of results from the R&D programmes that are now under way;
- to interact with the accelerator’s designers on questions relating to the machine-detector interface, including backgrounds, shielding, radiation levels, beam position monitoring, luminosity measurement and energy measurement;
- to look at the physics potential and technical possibilities for extensions of the programme to produce real photon-photon, electron-photon and electron-electron collisions;
- to extend the work of the “LoopVerein”, developing new tools and techniques for calculating precise rates for Standard Model and supersymmetric processes that match the expected experimental precision;
- to continue to make and extend contacts with physicists in the US, Asia and the rest of the world.
Wherever the collider is built, the collaborations carrying out the experiments are likely to be composed of groups from all over the world – as they were at LEP, and are at HERA, the Tevatron and the LHC.
The first workshop of the extended study will be held in Cracow, Poland, on 15-18 September 2001. Details of registration, the programme and the working groups can be found on the study’s Web page at http://www.desy.de/conferences/ecfa-desy-lcext.html. Some of the working groups on physics and detector topics are already holding their own specialized meetings.
There will be a worldwide workshop in Korea in summer 2002 – the fifth of the LCWS series, following Saariselkä, Finland 1991; Waikoloa, Hawaii 1993; Morioka, Japan 1995; Sitges, Spain 1999; and Fermilab, US 2000. An open invitation is offered to interested physicists from anywhere in the world to participate in all of these activities.
Membership of the ECFA/DESY study is likely to overlap strongly with the studies currently being carried out at CERN on the higher-energy CLIC collider. The two studies will also share tools and ideas.
The organizing committee for the extended ECFA/DESY study comprises Mikhail Danilov (ITEP, Moscow), Enrique Fernandez (Barcelona), Rolf Heuer (Hamburg), Leif Jönsson (Lund), Paolo Laurelli (Frascati), Martin Leenen (DESY), David Miller (UCL, London, chair), Walter Majerotto (Vienna), Francois Richard (Orsay), Albert de Roeck (CERN), Ron Settles (MPI, Munich), Janusz Zakrzewski (Warsaw) and Peter Zerwas (DESY).
