31 January 1996
ICFA Statement on a Tau Charm Factory
ICFA has noted that several intensive workshops have been held on the physics potential of a tau-charm factory. This collider is intended to operate at a luminosity of 1033cm-2sec-1, one hundred times the luminosity of the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider. The conclusion of these workshops is that a tau-charm factory can address issues concerning the tau, charmed particles, and light quark spectroscopy in a unique manner. Many of the issues can only be addressed by a tau-charm factory and cannot be fully addressed by B factories now under construction, or by high energy fixed target experiments.
There has been strong interest in a tau-charm factory by physicists from all regions of the world. Physicists from two nations, China and Russia, are seriously developing plans to construct such a facility. ICFA is pleased to note that the Chinese government has awarded funds of 5 million Yuan to the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing for the purpose of designing a tau-charm factory.
ICFA is pleased that international workshops on a tau-charm factory have been held over the past several years and that there are plans to hold additional ones in the future. In addition, the ICFA Beam Dynamics Panel is in the process of establishing a subpanel to assist in identifying and solving the beam dynamics issues associated with a tau-charm factory. ICFA supports the planning that must be done in advance of the construction of such a facility, and supports its construction, since there is ample justification for one such facility.
ICFA looks forward to the day when a tau-charm factory can begin operation, and encourages exploitation open to an international team in accordance with the existing ICFA Guidelines for Utilization of Major Regional Experimental facilities for High Energy Particle Physics.