At its triennial seminar, the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) discussed a range of projects that will safeguard the future of accelerator-based particle physics.

ICFA is the international body that facilitates international collaboration in the construction and use of particle accelerators for high-energy physics. Every three years, government officials, representatives of the major funding agencies, directors of major high energy physics laboratories, young and senior scientists come together to examine the current status of the field and discuss plans for future projects.

At this year’s seminar, held in Ottawa (Canada), participants heard about the latest scientific results in areas ranging from the search for dark matter to precision measurements of the Higgs boson, recent progress in accelerator and detector technologies, as well as ideas and design studies for both big accelerators and smaller scale projects.

Reports on the accelerator complexes currently in use or being proposed for particle physics in Europe, Asia and America were presented, with detailed discussion on future projects for both circular and linear accelerators. In this regard, supporting the conclusions of the Linear Collider Board (LCB), ICFA issued a statement of support for the International Linear Collider (ILC) as a Higgs boson factory operating at a center-of-mass energy of 250 GeV, as an international project led by Japanese initiative. ICFA also underscores the extendibility of the ILC to higher energies.