Europe-America-Japan Accelerator Development and Exchange Programme

EAJADE is a training and staff exchange network for accelerator R&D within elementary particle physics. The recent update of the European strategy for particle physics emphasises the need for a “Higgs factory” — a lepton collider able to study the Higgs boson in detail. Such a machine is both a precision instrument and a discovery machine for potentially groundbreaking physics.

All Higgs factory proposals require wide international collaboration for their implementation and 5-10 years of design refinements and technical developments before construction. The relevant expertise and infrastructures are globally distributed, and a wide interdisciplinary and inter-sectorial network is essential to make progress and train future experts in the field.

EAJADE makes use of international staff exchanges as a vehicle to efficiently boost technical progress, exploit facilities world-wide, create unique training opportunities, and build strong collaborations with Japanese and American scientists, and with industry partners in Europe.

Accelerator R&D and the realisation of future machines like a Higgs factory are truly global endeavours relying on expertise in a broad set of fields and a number of state-of-the-art technologies. Future facilities also need to carefully address their CO2 footprint, study the use of renewable energy sources and of energy efficiency, and aim to become models of sustainability. These challenges require intersectoral efforts and development of best practices.

EAJADE is expected to lead to important and innovative advances for accelerators and the related high-tech industry, with substantial benefits also for other disciplines where accelerators are about to become key instruments. It will also help develop a more performant and sustainable European knowledge-based economy, by providing top-level training to many physicists and engineers, and through the efforts to reduce the energy consumption of accelerator technology used in numerous facilities.