Announcement

KEK sets up the Planning Office for the International Linear Collider

February 6, 2014

High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)

Tsukuba, 6 January 2014. KEK, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan, has set up the Planning Office for the International Linear Collider (ILC), a proposed next-generation electron- positron collider. The office will be headed by Atsuto Suzuki, Director General of KEK.

KEK has been engaged in the global effort on research and development of accelerator and detector technologies for the ILC. This effort at KEK has been coordinated by the Linear Collider Project Office under the department of advanced accelerator technologies.

The new office at KEK will consist of two units: “the ILC Project Unit” and “the Coordination Unit”, and will oversight a broad range of activities required for realization of the ILC, in addition to the ongoing efforts.

The functionality of the LC Project Office will be integrated into the Planning Office for the ILC in steps, and KEK hopes that it serves as a precursor for an international planning organization for the ILC, as incrementally joined by scientists in Japan and from abroad.

Background Information:
The International Linear Collider is a proposed next-generation particle collider which will complement the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN. It is expected to ultimately lead the scientists to an understanding of the deepest secrets of the universe. The ILC will enable precision studies on the underlying physics of the Higgs boson, the particle responsible for the creation of mass in nature that was discovered at the LHC in 2012.

In June 2013, the GDE (the Global Design Effort), a team of international particle physicists, published the Technical Design Report (TDR). The TDR contains all the elements needed to propose the ILC to interested governments, including a technical design and a project implementation plan, that are realistic and have been optimized for performance, cost and risk. The report was signed by 2,400 scientists from around the world.

In August 2013, the ILC site evaluation committee of Japan, a subcommittee under Japan Association of High Energy Physics, after reviewing two candidate sites based on technical and social-environmental criteria, concluded that the Kitakami site in the north of the country is best qualified the as candidate site for the ILC in Japan. With the TDR and the site evaluation report, in October 2013, the Japanese particle physics community filled a petition for the Japanese government to invite the ILC to Japan.