ILC matters

While on the topic of physics related issues, I was very pleased to receive in the mail the four volumes of the Reference Design Reports for the International Linear Collider (ILC). I am happy to say that I am one of the (many hundreds of) authors of the volume on physics at the ILC. The home page of the ILC is here. Of course I am not happy to say that there are great difficulties on the path of the linear collider in the adverse funding environment in the USA and also in the UK. There is a good sign: there is now talk of collaboration between those advocating CLIC (Compact Linear Collider), CERN initiative with its own novel design and advantages, and the ILC. I also observed that the next CERN Director-General designate (elect?) Rolf-Dieter Heuer has been with ILC. Hopefully things will work out. I remember my giving a talk at an ECFA workshop in 2002 at St. Malo and had to reply to some insightful questions from an experimentalist who I had not known before. I peeked at the name tag and that was Heuer! On a lighter note, when I was giving a talk on polarization at the ILC at IIT Bombay, a well-known nuclear physicist Prof. Yogi Gambhir looked at the annoucement and was asking some one why some one was giving a talk on LIC policies! (For non-Indian readers of this humble blog, if any, the acronym LIC has only one hegemonic expansion: it stands for the Life Insurance Corporation!).