Atsuto Suzuki Director General

2008.01.04
Roadmap of KEK

The future program of KEK will reach a turning point in the years 2009 and 2010. First of all, J-PARC, a high intensity proton accelerator complex, will complete the first phase of construction at Tokai. Material and life science experiments using neutrons and muons will then start as well as particle and nuclear physics experiments including neutrino studies. The KEK B factory is expected to reach the initial target integrated luminosity, 1/ab, by that time. The engineering design report for the international linear collider, the ILC, will be presented up to 2010 by an international collaboration. The community of scientists using the light source facility has also proposed that R&D for an energy recovery linac (ERL) should be carried out as the next generation light source. Finally, it is anticipated that the international experimental program at the LHC, Large Hadron Collider at CERN will announce their first results around 2010.

Given this progress inside and outside Japan, it is necessary to present KEK's roadmap soon to provide a guideline for the future program of KEK. Therefore, I framed a tentative plan in April last year, based on the interim roadmap proposed by Professor Totsuka, the former Director General of KEK, taking into account the proposals by the relevant scientific communities. A roadmap planning committee chaired by Professor Fumihiko Takasaki, Director of IPNS, was then formed, which is in charge of submitting a roadmap report to me. I received the report from this committee last fall (Ref. 1 and Ref. 2) ; it will be finalized taking into account recommendations by the international roadmap review committee scheduled in March 2008, as well as the opinions of the relevant scientific communities. The roadmap will then be submitted to various governmental committees. The attached figure (Ref. 2) is the timeline recommended by the roadmap planning committee with some corrections included.

The purpose of the roadmap is to form a leading research center in the world, by further reinforcing the various research activities at KEK. The plans for J-PARC, the LHC and the light source facility are basically the same as the ones presented in the interim roadmap by Professor Totsuka. However, we are now at the point to decide between early ILC construction and Super-KEKB upgrading the current KEKB, which were mentioned in parallel as an option in the interim report. The roadmap planning committee has proposed to start an early upgrade of KEKB to realize a unique research facility that will enable advanced studies on rare B decays, and to conduct a strong R&D program on superconducting cavities and related topics in order to contribute to the early realization of the ILC. I support the proposal by the committee.

Recently the UK and US governments made the decisions of large budget cuts to the High Energy Physics programs. I would like to express my deep distress about this. As the size of accelerator science projects grows bigger and bigger and the time span of each project becomes longer and longer, it is essential to build up wide-international collaborations and to establish solid ground to support such collaborations in pursuit of the frontier science and accelerator/detector technology.

On the other hand, we can never conduct such research programs using large scale facilities unless we have strong support from taxpayers, as well as active contributions by researchers to the society in general. We have a rich research environment at KEK that produces the highest level of research in the world. Now it is time for us to make a serious commitment to solving various societal issues such as energy and environmental problems through cooperation with industry and technology transfer to society, in addition to producing the highest level research outcomes. It is, thus, the mission of KEK to create a new research framework beyond the one that we already have for research in fundamental science.