The main goal for the next month is to prepare for the ILC Pre-lab. Image: Rey.Hori
After seven years of work, the Linear Collider Board (LCB) and Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC), which were established by the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) completed their term in June 2020. Taking into account the recent increase of political support in Japan for the ILC, ICFA concluded that the ILC project should take a step towards the preparatory phase for a future ILC laboratory. To help this move, ICFA established the ILC International Development Team (ILC-IDT) whose mandate is to prepare for the creation of the ILC Pre-laboratory. Unlike LCB and LCC who were promoting a linear collider in general, the ILC-IDT focuses on the ILC with Japan as the host country.
There is a clear pressure from the high-energy physics community to move fast. The recent update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics has underlined the European interest to collaborate with ILC if it were realised in a timely fashion. The goal of the IDT is to complete the preparation for the ILC Pre-laboratory in a timescale of 1.5 to two years, which is extremely ambitious. There is a lot of work to be done: making a proposal for the organisation and governance of the Pre-laboratory, establishing a scheme where the national and regional laboratories worldwide can contribute to the work during the Pre-laboratory phase so that all the technical specifications for the ILC project being completed and ready for the construction phase, and much more. However, the members of the ILC-IDT Executive Board, who took office in August, are very motivated to tackle this challenge with a support from KEK who is hosting the ILC-IDT. In parallel to our activities, we hope that the effort by the Japanese colleagues will result in a positive move by the Japanese government that is equally essential for establishing the Pre-laboratory.
Lastly, I would like to express our sincere and deepest appreciation to the members of LCB and LCC, in particular the LCC Director, Lyn Evans and his management team as well as the first Chair of LCB, Sachio Komamiya, for their long lasting effort which made it possible to make this new step.
About the author: Tatsuya Nakada is Professor Emeritus at EPFL in Lausanne and the first spokesperson of the LHCb experiment at CERN. Born in Japan, he has been in Europe since 1978, mostly in Switzerland working for SIN/PSI, the University of Lausanne, CERN and EPFL, as well as for teaching assignment at the University of Fribourg and ETHZ. He has also been serving for the European particle physics community as a former Chair of ECFA, the last Scientific Secretary for the European Strategy Session of the CERN Council and former Chair of the Scientific Policy Committee of CERN.
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