International Linear Collider | International Linear Collider.

About

About the International Linear Collider

The International Linear Collider (ILC) will be a necessary tool for unlocking some of the deepest mysteries about the universe. The ILC will allow physicists to precisely explore extremely high-energy regions.

Consisting of two linear accelerators that will stretch approximately 20 kilometers in length, the ILC will smash electrons and their antimatter particles, positrons, together at nearly the speed of light. Colliding nearly 7,000 times every second, the electrons and positrons will create an array of new particles that could help answer some of the most fundamental questions of all time: What is the Higgs boson? What are dark matter and dark energy? Does supersymmetry exist?

About the ILC International Development Team

The ILC International Development Team (IDT) was created by the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). The mandate of the Team is to prepare the ILC Pre-Lab as the first step of the preparation phase of the ILC to be constructed in Japan as an international project. The Team will work towards making a timely realisation of the ILC possible.

WINDOW TO THE TERASCALE

Particle accelerators have been the primary tool of particle physics for over 60 years. They have enabled great advances and discoveries, the latest being the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Using complementary approaches of colliding protons on protons as a broad-band discovery device and electrons on positrons as a precision probe of the physics, we have uncovered the basic constituents of matter and interactions among them together with the underlying symmetries. The International Linear Collider (ILC), an electron-positron collider in a linear format, could be the next advance complementary to the Large Hadron Collider. The ILC would enable precision studies for the properties of the Higgs, which is a completely new kind of particle responsible for the creation of mass in nature.

In the past, larger and larger circular particle accelerators and colliders have brought us at each step to higher energies and new discoveries of physics at very short distances. Now, the development of a linear collider represents yet another major step in our ability to accelerate and collide very light particles, like electrons and positrons, at high energies, which paves the way to new insights into how our world works. The technologies for a linear collider have been developed through an ambitious global R&D programme.

The ILC is now technically ready for construction. The Japanese high energy physics community has been enthusiastically promoting the ILC to be hosted in the mountainous regions of northern Japan as a global project and seeking a support of the Japanese government. It is proposed as a Higgs Factory with a capability to be extended to higher energies in the future. The worldwide community strongly supports this effort and looks forward to taking part in the realization of the ILC in the very near future.