On October 25, particle physicists expressed their strong commitment to realising the International Linear Collider (ILC) in Japan. Gathered in Arlington, Texas, United States, at the International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders (LCWS2018), a scientific conference about future international particle physics projects, they issued a statement (the “Texas statement”) in this regard.
The ILC is a proposed particle accelerator whose mission is to carry out research about the fundamental particles and forces that govern the universe. It would complement the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012, and shed more light on the discoveries scientists have made and are likely to make there in the coming years. The ILC will be one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated scientific endeavours, whose realisation will involve a truly global participation.
Excerpts from the Texas statement: “The ILC is the right new experimental facility to advance our understanding of the Universe.
The ILC project has been developed by an international collaboration over three decades. We conceived it as the machine to lead the era of particle physics at the Terascale [at the teraelectronvolt (TeV), or thousand billion electronvolts, energy scale] with the Higgs particle as the centrepiece. [At the LHC, currently protons are made to collide head-on with a total energy of 13 TeV.] The discovery of the Higgs particle by the LHC fixed the needed energy, and we now have a concrete plan for the ILC Higgs factory…. If scientifically justified by the findings of the precision Higgs study, the collision energy of the ILC can be easily upgraded….
“Global collaboration has made enormous progress in the development of the superconducting acceleration technology, improving its performance by quantum leaps. This technology, developed for the ILC, is now essential, for example, for the current state-of-the-art X-ray and neutron facilities. More innovations broadly benefitting science and society are in store as we proceed along our path….”
