The CALICE collaboration meeting in Lyon is in its last day, and I have just finished giving all my presentations… 4 in total, which is really crazy. However, only two of those I actually prepared myself (the last one last night, after the collaboration dinner), the other two I was giving for people who could not be here, one because of lack of travel funds, and one because of lack of planning. As usual, there were also many interesting discussions on the side, during coffee breaks, at the collaboration dinner, over beers late in the evening and even during talks I skipped for little meetings on the side.
Also, it was the best attended CALICE meeting ever, with more than 90 participants. And this after the ILC detector concepts which have CALICE participation (ILD and SID), just got validated by the International Detector Advisory Group. The R&D effort on calorimeters for future linear colliders, both for the ILC and for CLIC (which is now also an integral part of the CALICE program), is not slowing down now that the first milestones have been achieved. On the contrary, there are plenty of new ideas which hopefully get studied in the near future.
By the way, the CALICE calorimeter R&D was mentioned as one of the crucial aspects that led to the validation of the ILD concept (actually, this was mentioned in the report as the most impressive aspect), where the studies I was involved in, demonstrating novel calibration techniques for these new, highly granular calorimeters, played a major role.
Tonight I will fly home, convinced that the CALICE R&D program is as strong as ever, with many more interesting things to come.
