Attendees at the EUDET Kick-Off meeting.

Approximately 100 participants met at DESY on 15-17 February for two and a half days of intense discussions at the EUDET Kick-Off meeting. EUDET is a European Integrated Infrastructure Initiative aiming at the improvement and development of infrastructures for ILC detector developments. Twenty-two participating institutes and 21 associated institutes join forces in a project with a budget of approximately 21.5 million Euros, of which the European Commission contributes 7 million Euros. The project started officially six weeks before the Kick-off meeting on 1 January 2006 and will run for four years. The Kick-off meeting was the first opportunity for the whole collaboration to come together and discuss future plans in detail.

Joachim Mnich (DESY), coordinator of the EUDET project, was very satisified with the outcome of the meeting. "Especially the participants and contributions from our Asian and American colleagues at the meeting underline the strong wish to integrate EUDET into the worldwide ILC detector R&D efforts," he said. "The project had a successful start, first rather detailed ideas and plans for the infrastructures were presented. Everyone in the ILC community is encouraged to contribute to the design, construction and later exploitation to make EUDET most useful for the ILC project."

While EUDET is organised in four sub-projects concentrating on the development and improvement of testbeam infrastructures, infrastructures for tracking and calorimetry as well as a detector development network, intensified collaboration started between the partners in particular also across the different subdetectors on issues like common DAQs and analysis frameworks.

The large number of participants, many of them from extra-EUDET institutes, exemplifies the large interest in the project, as well as the use of the rapidly evolving central webpage at www.eudet.org.

The agenda of the meeting and the transparencies of the talks can be accessed here:

https://ilcsupport.desy.de/cdsagenda/fullAgenda.php?ida=a061

-- Karsten Buesser