Session M4: International Collaboration on Physics Megaprojects: ILC and ITER

Congressional Attitudes Toward Megaprojects

At least since the debate over the SSC, Congress has urged the internationalization of megaprojects. But there's not much of a track record since then, although the U.S. has carried through with its funding for CERN. Congress has been supportive of ITER, but the project is stalled and science budgets in general are getting tighter. The next few years will set the pattern of how Congress will proceed.   

Global Collaborations - Prospects and Problems

International collaboration has long been a feature of science. Collaborative investments in joint facilities and projects have grown considerably over the past 20-40 years, and many projects have been multinational from the start. This has been particularly true in Europe, where intergovernmental organizations such as CERN, ESA, and ESO have enabled European countries to carry out forefront science with state-of-art facilites which would have been beyond the capabilities of any one country. A brief survey of these organizations, their structure, and the possible reasons behind their success is given. The transition from regional to global creates new problems. Global scale projects face a range of generic issues which must be addressed and overcome if the project is to be a success. Each project has its own specific boundary conditions and each adopts an approach best fitted to its own objectives and constraints. Experience with billion dollar projects such as the SSC, LHC, and ITER shows the key problem areas and demonstrates the importance of preparatory work in the early stages to settle issues such as schedule, funding, location, legal and managerial structure, and oversight. A range of current and proposed intercontinental or global projects - so- called ``Megascience Projects" - is reviewed. Such projects, originally a feature of space and particle physics, are now becoming more common, and very large projects in astronomy, for example ALMA and 50 - 100m telescopes, and other areas of physics now fall into the `global' category. These projects are on such a large scale, from any scientific, managerial, financial or political perspective, and have such global importance, that they have necessarily been conceived as international from the outset. Increasing financial pressures on governments and funding agencies in the developed countries place additional demands on the project planning. The contrasting approaches, problems faced, and progress made in various projects will be analyzed and possible lessions drawn out. The role which can be played in the early stages by bodies such as the OECD Global Science Forum and G-8 Carnegie Meetings, where science policy makers meet, is examined. Experience shows that these valuable `scene setting' discussions have to be informed by coordinated input from the scientific community and must be followed up by more detailed discussions between funding agencies or their equivalent, because decision making requires the development of a consensus amongst the participants. This process can be illustrated most effectively by the care with which the ideas for the International Linear Collider have been and are being developed. Agreement on building and operating a facility is not the end of the story. The legitimate desire of scientists in all other countries to be able to participate in exploiting a major new facility has to be taken into account, and that introduces a range of proprietary and sociological issues over data access and rights, and now, with the explosion in computing and storage powers, in data archiving support. These are issues which can be addressed within the scientific community and taken to the political arena via such bodies as the OECD Global Science Forum.   

A Globally Designed Linear Collider

The International Linear Collider is a proposed future international particle accelerator. It would create high-energy particle collisions between electrons and positrons, their antimatter counterparts. The collider would occupy a tunnel up to 40 km in length. The ILC would provide a tool for scientists to address many of the most compelling questions of the 21st century about dark matter, extra dimensions, and the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time. From its inception, the ILC would be designed, funded, managed and operated as an international scientific project. Scientists from throughout the worldwide particle physics community have endorsed an electron-positron linear collider as the next high- energy particle accelerator. Last August, an international panel made a difficult but necessary decision in choosing superconducting-technology for the accelerating system of the ILC. The decision opened they way for the world particle physics community to concentrate its combined resources behind one technology. There is a long way to go and much hard work needed before the final design of the ILC is established. A Global Design Organization is now being formed to coordinate this effort.