International Linear Collider: Physics, Machine, Experiments

Abstract

There is a consensus within the particle physics community that the next big endeavour after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a proton-proton collider presently being built at CERN, should be an e⁺e^- linear collider with an energy reach up to 1 TeV. This accelerator, called International Linear Collider (ILC), will extend our knowledge about physics at the tera-scale whatever the LHC findings will be.
The clean experimental environment and the flexibility with which a well known initial state can be chosen are among the strengths of the ILC which allow to complement the picture drawn by the LHC.

Among the questions addressed at the ILC are:

• What mechanism gives mass to elementary particles?
• What does dark matter consist of?
• Do the known forces unify?
• Are there additional spacetime dimensions? If yes, how many?

These are all very fundamental questions longing for answers for many years.

The lecture will introduce step-by-step into the ILC project: the accelerator design and technology, the proposed detector concepts for the ILC, measurements about Higgs physics, supersymmetry, exotic models, top quark physics and gauge boson couplings and finally the interplay between the ILC and the LHC as well as cosmology.

The course assumes some basic knowledge about elementary particle physics.

Peter Wienemann

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Institute of Physics, University of Bonn