| Minutes of The 3rd Plenary ACFA Meeting |
The third Plenary ACFA meeting was held in Tsukuba / Japan,hosted by High Energy Accelerator Research Organization ( KEK ), on March 25th, 1998. The First Asian Particle Accelerator Conference was also held at KEK from 24 till 27 March, concurrently with this meeting.
| Hirotaka Sugawara (Chairman) | Zhipeng Zheng (Vice-Chairman) |
| Setsuya Kawabata (Secretary) | Shuhong Wang (Deputy Secretary) |
| Stuart N. Tovey (U.Melbourne ) | Claudio Tuniz (ANSTO/Australia) |
| Shouxian Fang (IHEP/Beijing) | Dingchang Xian (IHEP/China) |
| Tao Huang (IHEP/Beijing) | Jia-er Chen ( Peking U.) |
| Bauwen Wei (IMP/Lanzhou) | Yuzheng Lim (Tsinghua U./Beijing) |
| Zuping Liu (NSRL/Hefei) | Hongjie Xu (SINR/ Shanghai ) |
| S.S. Kapoor (BARC/India) | Som Nath Ganguli (TIFR/India) |
| A.S. Raja Rao (CAT/Indore) | G.K. Mehta (NSC/NewDelhi) |
| Azhar Djaloeis (BATAN/Jakarta) | Yorikiyo Nagashima (Osaka U./Osaka) |
| Motohiro Kihara (KEK/Tsukuba) | Shin-ichi Kurokawa (KEK/Tsukuba) |
| Won Namkung (PAL/Pohang) | Joo-Sang Kang (Korea U./Korea) |
| Moohyun Yoon (POSTECH/Pohang) | Swee-Ping Chia (U.Malaya/Malaysia) |
| Ian C. Hsu (TsingHua U./Taiwan) | Richard Sah (SRRC/Taiwan) |
| Weerapong Pairsuwan (NSRC/Thailand) | Takeo Ishii (NSRC/Thailand) |
| Tran Thanh Minh (INST/Hanoi) | Van Do Nguyen (Inst. Physics/Hanoi) |
There were 32 participants including 13 observers in the meeting,who introduced themselves before starting discussions.
| Australia | 1 | Germany | 3 | Korea | 36 | Taiwan | 7 |
| Canada | 2 | India | 10 | Malaysia | 1 | Thailand | 2 |
| China | 32 | Indonesia | 2 | Netherlands | 1 | USA | 15 |
| France | 3 | Japan | 220 | Russia | 7 | Vietnam | 3 |
Since almost all reports on the current status were presented in the APAC98 concurrently held at KEK, only the following reports weregiven at the meeting:
| High Energy Physics Programs in Australia | S. Tovey |
| BEPC/BES Experiment | Z. Zheng |
| Linear Collider Project | H. Sugawara |
In addition Prof. C. Tuniz (ANSTO) reported the Australian Synchrotron Radiation facility and the 20MW Reactor as a neutron source, approvedlast year.
Prof. A. Djaloeis proposed strongly that ACFA should consider the medicaland industrial application seriously as well as High energy physics etc.The meeting re-confirmed the importance of these fields as written in the article 4b of the ACFA document.
An ad hoc session for the international collaboration in Asia was jointly heldin APAC98, where the following four talks were made as the starting point ofdiscussion:
| a. | Network connection in Asia | Y. Watase | (KEK) |
| b. | Electronic publication | Y. Chin | (KEK) |
| c. | Aspect of R&D and experiment | S. Wang | (IHEP) |
| d. | Social and political aspect | W. Namkung | (PAL) |
Although the network working group was created in 1996, the contact person from eachregion is not yet fixed. It is urgent to identify the contact persons, and to survey and report the current status.
In the second talk Prof. Chin proposed to publish the APAC proceedings by CD-ROM.As the result of discussion ACFA decided to create a working group of CD-ROM publication,which will help the APAC local organizer publish the proceedings technically.
To ACFA Chairman
---- Physics Study Group for the e+e- Linear Collider ----
In the 2nd plenary meeting, ACFA announced its endorsement of the e+e- linear collider as one of the major future facilities in the Asia-Pacific region. In fact, recent world-wide research at existing facilities has enabledus to form a more and more concrete picture of TeV-scale physics and, consequently, has made more and more crucial the e+e- linear collider's role in its exploration. According to the recent picture, the linear collider is expected to produce very important, decisive physics outputs even in the initial stage (in the energy region below 500GeV) of its energy upgrading program ; for instance, a top quark study at threshold, which is very important in its own right, can be a key to new physics and, more importantly,the Higgs particle will almost certainly manifest itself there or the SUSY/GUTS scenario will be disapproved.
In addition to its role as an energy frontier machine for High Energy Physics, the linear collider has a facet which can be shared with a new means for materials science. The ultra-low emittance beam essential to the linear collider is also an indispensable element of the next-generation, coherent x-ray source. In order to efficiently and effectively promote accelerator science in the region, one should start seriously thinking about the possibility of integrating both into a single project.
Turning our attention to activities in Asian region, we see significantprogress in high energy and synchrotron radiation experiments at various domestic facilities. Not only that, many researchers from ACFA member nations are actively participating in large-scale experiments such as at LEP-II, Tevatron collider, HERA and PEP-II/KEKB. The Asian physics community on which ACFA is based has grown significantly and has set a firm enough foundation to prepare for further advancement.
In response to the ACFA statement issued in the last year, consideringthe importance of the linear collider project and the potential of our community to realize it, we propose to set up a study group under ACFA. The charge of the group shall be to elucidate physics scenario and experimentalfeasibilities and to write up a report to ACFA within two years. Taking accountof the scale of and the world-wide interests in such project, actual studies shall hopefully be carried out in a more global scope in spite of the regionalnature of ACFA's initiative. KEK is willing to play a secretarial role in the study.