SLAC, 31 January 1997
ICFA Statement on the Large Hadron Collider
The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on 31 January 1997, together with Directors of the world’s major high energy physics laboratories. ICFA noted with great satisfaction that in December 1996 the CERN Council approved construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in a single stage, with commissioning planned for 2005. The LHC will open a new energy domain and address today’s key questions in particle physics, and is essential for further progress in this field. Its importance is indicated by the commitment of the nineteen CERN Member States and of non-Member States to support both the facility and the experiments. The LHC will be a true world facility: some twenty-five non-Member States will contribute to and participate in the experiments, and contributions to the accelerator itself from Canada, India, Israel, Japan, Russia and the USA have been agreed or proposed. This development fulfills the primary purpose of ICFA which is "to promote international collaboration in all phases of the construction and exploitation of very high energy accelerators". It is a very important step forward in interregional collaboration, which ICFA regards as an excellent precedent.