Large International Linear Collider Collaboration Status

Maria Spiropulu

The International Linear Collider (ILC) project has been promoted by the international community of elementary particle physicists as a global project.  Its scientific value is concentrated on the detailed exploration of the H (125) boson as well as any other new physics particle at the TeV scale that the machine can access. The technical design of the facility was presented in the Technical Design Report (TDR) in June 2013. The 2015 summer conferences of both the European Physical Society, HEP 2015, Vienna and the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society offered reports on the post-TDR work towards the ILC. The focus has been on the site-specific design of an up to 500 GeV machine while the physics studies have been performed for up to 1 TeV center of mass. Advancement in superconducting radio frequency technology was presented. A notable example was the December 2014 ILC-type cryomodule test at Fermilab after initial testing at Jefferson Lab. A gradient of < 31.5 > MV/m was achieved exceeding ILC specifications.

The international community of the ILC project proposes to construct the machine in Japan with an ambitious goal of building an “international science city” associated with the ILC.  The ILC advisory panel published its findings and recommendations on the ILC path forward on Aug 6 2015 (http://newsline.linearcollider.org/2015/08/06/). The recommendations of the panel include careful exploration of i) the cost sharing model among the international partners (the price tag for the machine is estimated at about 10B USD) ii) the maximization of the accelerator performance especially in view of the 13 TeV LHC results and iii) the understanding of the project by the public and science communities. A follow-up working group is being formed to review the necessary human resources during the construction and operation phases. This group will also review world trends in technology issues related to accelerator construction and cost reduction. In the meantime, the Advanced Accelerator Association Promoting Science & Technology (AAA) in Japan and the Hudson Institute in the US are working closely on embedding the ILC into a Japan-US technology co-operation framework.

Professor Maria Spiropulu is an experimental physicist at the California Institute of Technology. She is a member of the CMS collaboration and is Chair-Elect of the FIP

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