Particle physicists the world over are eager to know more about the new boson, announced by CERN last summer to be “consistent with the Higgs” (see Physics Today, September 2012, page 12). Is it the Higgs? Is there more than one type of Higgs? The International Linear Collider (ILC) would address those and other questions.
The technical design for the next-generation accelerator was completed this past December and, says design team leader Barry Barish of Caltech, “I think it will happen in Japan in the next two or three years, or not at all.” At present, no other country or region is in a position to pony up billions of dollars to host the ILC. In Europe money for high-energy physics will be tied up in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for at least the next decade, and the US political situation makes it a nonstarter. China wants...
