New International Offices of KEK and CERN

November 25, 2014

Signing ceremony at KEK for new international offices of KEK and CERNKEK and CERN have agreed to establish mutual offices at the respective labs: a CERN office at KEK and a KEK office at CERN, to facilitate and enhance common work on future accelerator projects and other related scientific projects of common interest.

Taking the occasion of the 9th CERN-KEK Meeting, which took place on 21 November 2014 at KEK, Atsuto Suzuki, Director-General of KEK, and Rüdiger Voss, Head of International Relations of CERN, signed the Appendix to the umbrella agreement, which was concluded between CERN and KEK in 2009, to establish the offices.

Each party is involved both in the operation of existing accelerator complexes and in research and development of future accelerators and accelerator concepts. There are multiple collaborative projects in these domains between the parties. Current collaborative projects cover in particular aspects of LHC and its upgrade, the LHC injectors, ILC, CLIC, J-PARC and ATF/ATF2, with common activities related to the FCC study and SuperKEKB currently under preparation.

"With the establishment of the branch offices, we have entered into a new phase of international cooperation in which human and technological resources are shared with each other. We hope that this new scheme will gather momentum on advancing accelerator science, " said Atsuto Suzuki, Director General of KEK.

"For many years, CERN and KEK have collaborated on the LHC including its upgrade and on linear Collider studies, which are both important strategic objectives for CERN and for European particle physics. The establishment of these offices will strengthen even further the successful partnership between our laboratories," said Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN.