Advice to Speakers
Research and Development Opportunities for the Linear Collider
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
April 5, 2002

We plan to distribute a spiral-bound booklet containing hardcopies of speakers' presentations at the start of the workshop. Please send an electronic version of your talk (pdf if possible) to George Gollin by noon, March 29 so there will be sufficient time to print the booklet.


This is important: the principal aim of the workshop is to set before participants brief (but concrete) descriptions of a large number of research and development projects that they might choose to undertake.

HEP experimental work involves a mix of projects with widely varying time scales. Much of the focus for those not yet actively involved with the linear collider is on long-term issues (stability of funding, physics problems given the uncertain Higgs mass,...).

We would like to generate excitement by appealing to the enjoyment found in the day-to-day activities associated with the shorter time-scale research tasks: writing code, designing circuits, studying detector prototypes,...

Participants should leave the workshop with a sense of possible paths they could follow, with the pleasure of hands-on work included in their sense of what involvement in the LC could be like for them.


Here's a possible way of structuring a typical accelerator or detector talk:

  • Summarize the connection between physics goals and performance specs briefly (2 slides??)
  • Summarize briefly the current thinking about how the accelerator/detector system might be configured, and why ("It's a TPC, but maybe it'll be silicon strips instead... Perhaps we'll do digital calorimetry...") (2 slides??)
  • Spend most of the talk describing unresolved nuts-and-bolts technical issues, with comments about
    • what is already known and what one might do first in approaching the problem
    • who has thought about it a little, and could provide suggestions on how to get started
    Keep each of these brief (perhaps two slides per R&D topic) and very concrete. If you can present a dozen different two-page sketches of possible projects, good; if you have the strength, even more would even better.
  • Encourage establishment of cross-disciplinary collaborations at home institutions (HEP + EE, MatSci, ChemE,...)


Some reasonable ground rules:

  1. Stay clear of political issues. Discussions should be:
    • site-neutral when appropriate
    • inclusive of studies needed for both TESLA and NLC/JLC.
  2. Think across traditional system boundaries:
    • required performance will couple many accelerator and detector systems' properties
    • cool projects abound in domains participants might not have thought to consider
    • point out that interesting possibilities for collaboration with colleagues in other domains (e.g. condensed matter) exist.
  3. Be at ease with expressing ignorance and confusion in public.


    Please remember: we want electronic versions of your talks by noon, March 29 (pdf, if possible; email them to George Gollin) so there will be sufficient time to print hardcopies for distribution at the start of the workshop!!



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