Nature advocates Japan for International Linear Collider

Nature: Following news reports that Japan is the likely home of the envisioned International Linear Collider, Nature‘s editors are urging support for Japanese scientists in their bid to host it. The envisioned 31-km-long ILC would use superconducting radiofrequency technology to accelerate the electrons and positrons whose collisions would let physicists build on new knowledge generated at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The editors report that Japanese politicians “seem increasingly interested” and propose that Japan’s ILC design contributions and a “slew of high-profile experiments built in the 1990s and 2000s show that [Japan] has the skill and industrial know-how to take on an advanced accelerator.” They observe that “Europe seems to be coming around to the idea” and that for the US, it “would probably require a willingness to slow” Fermilab’s neutrino program. They assert that “deep down, US physicists know that participation in the ILC is the only real option if the nation is to remain at the vanguard of particle physics.” An “early show of support could give the collider the push it needs to get under way,” they write, yielding “a great victory for Japan, and the world.”