Shigeki Chiba, Vice-governor of Iwate, will visit CERN in Switzerland next week as well as other places in Europe. There, he will talk with heads of international researcher organizations in hopes of realizing the International Linear Collider project (ILC). Soon, the Japanese national government will make a decision on whether or not to host the project, and this visit will help prepare the area to receive the project.

Vice-governor Chiba will be in Europe from 1/17-1/21, and will also promote Iwate tourism and products. He will visit CERN on the 18th to meet with Lyn Evans, the director of the Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC), an organization of international researchers that started off with a new structure this month.

If the ILC is realized in Iwate, many researchers and their families will come to live in the area. The Vice-governor will hear opinions on how to tackle this challenge as well as convey our gratitude for being chosen as the host of the Linear Collider Workshop (LCWS) which was an international conference held in Iwate in December 2016.

Jun Sasaki, executive director of the Office of Science and ILC Promotion of Iwate Prefecture, will accompany the governor. He will visit Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany on the 21st to talk with Joachim Mnich, Chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), the organization above the LCC.

The ILC will be a massive research facility for particle physics, and the leading candidate site is the Kitakami mountains of Iwate Prefecture. The Japanese national government is scheduled to make a decision on whether or not to host to project from the end of 2017 to sometime in 2018.

“We are conveying local enthusiasm and are moving to the next step of preparing the area to receive the project. I would like to use the researchers’ thoughts and our impressions of the visit in the prefecture’s future initiatives,” vowed Vice-governor Chiba.