ILC International Development Team publishes the Proposal for the ILC Preparatory Laboratory

An international scientific consensus supports an electron-positron Higgs Factory as the highest-priority next collider, and timely construction of the International Linear Collider (ILC) hosted in Japan is strongly supported by the international community.

Today, the international effort to realise ILC in Japan took another step forward with the publication of the document titled “Proposal for the ILC Preparatory Laboratory (Pre-lab)”. This proposal is prepared by the ILC International Development Team (ILC-IDT) and endorsed by the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA).

Credit: Rey. Hori

“The IDT has achieved the major milestone of completing this proposal, which outlines the organisational framework, an implementation model and a work plan of the Pre-lab”, said Tatsuya Nakada, Chair of the IDT Executive Board and Professor Emeritus at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.

All the technical development and engineering design needed for the start of the construction of the ILC laboratory should be completed during the preparatory phase. In the same period, governmental authorities of interested nations are expected to forge an agreement on the sharing of the cost and responsibilities for the construction and operation of the ILC facility and on the organisational structure and governance of the ILC Laboratory. The Pre-lab is the organisation conceived to execute activities such as completion of the technical and engineering preparation for the ILC project to be ready for construction, and to assist the intergovernmental discussion by providing relevant information if required. The IDT expects this preparatory phase to start around 2022, and to last for about four years.

This proposal is intended to provide information to the laboratories and governmental authorities interested in the ILC project to allow them to consider participation.

Further details will be developed during the actual implementation process of this proposal to establish the Pre-lab. The implementation will reflect input from governmental authorities in Japan and elsewhere, from laboratories that are the basis of the Pre-lab’s collaborative work, and from the international physics community that is the driving force for the ILC project.

“The IDT activity now enters the phase of implementing the steps for establishing the Pre-lab along the lines described in the proposal. We will continue to do our best for the swift realisation of the Pre-lab. Exciting times are head of us all.” Nakada said.

Full text of Proposal for the ILC Preparatory Laboratory (Pre-lab)

About IDT

The ILC International Development Team (ILC-IDT), chaired by Tatsuya Nakada, a professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, was established in 2020 by the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) with the mandate to make preparations for the ILC Pre-Lab in Japan, as the first step of the preparation phase of the ILC project.

About ICFA

ICFA, the International Committee for Future Accelerators, was created to facilitate international collaboration in the planning, construction and use of accelerators for high energy physics. The Committee has 16 members, selected primarily from the regions most deeply involved in high-energy physics.

About the ILC

The International Linear Collider (ILC) is an international endeavour that brings together scientists and engineers from universities and laboratories around the world. Consisting of two linear accelerators that face each other, the ILC will accelerate and collide electrons and their anti-particles, positrons. Superconducting radiofrequency accelerator cavities operating at temperatures near absolute zero give the particles more and more energy until they collide in the detectors at the centre of the machine. Bunches of electrons and positrons will collide roughly 7,000 times per second at a collision energy of 250 GeV, creating a surge of new particles that are tracked and registered in the ILCʼs detectors. Each bunch will contain 20 billion electrons or positrons concentrated into an area much smaller than that of a human hair. This means a very high rate of particle interactions. This high “luminosity”, when combined with the very precise interaction of two point-like colliding particles that annihilate each other, will allow the ILC to deliver a wealth of data to scientists that will allow the properties of particles, such as the Higgs boson, recently discovered at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, to be measured precisely. It will also shed light on new areas of physics, such as dark matter.