The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)’s Panel of Experts on the ILC has reinstated their working group on elementary particle physics because of the recent changes to the ILC plan. They met at MEXT on January 18th for their first meeting since reinstatement.

Eleven members were in attendance. In November 2017, the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) approved a plan to reduce the initial length of the ILC from 31 km to 20 km, so the members discussed the scientific significance of that decision.

Prof. Keisuke Fujii of KEK explained what’s been going on recently at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He stressed that the ILC was important because “the LHC has found no signs of new particles, so the best way forward for particle physics is a more precise measurement of the Higgs particle, which would be done by the ILC.”

The Elementary Particle Physics Working Group had met 8 times in 2014-2015. It was reinstated along with the Technical Design Report Verification Working Group following the change to the ILC plan.

Head of the group, Director Takashi Nakano of Osaka University’s Research Center for Nuclear Physics, said, “We hope to continue our discussions so that we can better explain to the general public what the ILC should be researching and the scientific importance of that research.”