Within the Panel of Experts deliberating on the ILC for the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology, Sports and Culture (MEXT) is the Working Group for the Verification of Methods of Structure and Management (Chief: Shoken Miyama, former head of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan). On May 23rd, they held their fourth meeting at MEXT, where they deliberated on management structures for the ILC with CERN as a reference.

One of the members, Prof. Katsuo Tokushuku, director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies at KEK, explained that at CERN, each international joint experiment like the LHC or ATLAS detector is split up into separate organizations.

CERN is run with contributions from the member countries, and in the budgetary sense this gives CERN a high level of independence. Prof. Tokushoku stressed this merit and stated, “It is important to create a central organization at the ILC laboratory as well, as well as an agreement to increase the ratio of joint operating costs from each country.”

Comments from other members included, “Would we be able to create and run such organizations with the current community of Japanese researchers?” and “Partnerships between researchers and businesses will be a strength to Japan.”

The leading candidate site for the ILC is in the Kitakami mountains of Iwate Prefecture. The Working Group will prepare their report by July, and the national government will take these reports into account as it decides sometime in 2017-2018 on whether to host the project.