ICFA on international collaboration

International collaboration in high energy physics is what ICFA - the International Committee for Future Accelerators - is all about. Progress is highlighted every three years when ICFA convenes its 'Future Perspectives in High Energy Physics' seminar to focus attention on major issues and to identify evolving trends. The latest such seminar, held at the DESY Laboratory in Hamburg from 3-7 May, looked at international cooperation in the construction of major facilities. Status reports across the whole range of existing experimental programmes and ongoing plans gave valuable pointers to future needs. For electron-positron linear colliders (EPLC), research and development work towards the next generation of machines is underway in Laboratories throughout the world. At previous such seminars, at Tsukuba, Japan (1984), Brookhaven, USA (1987) and Protvino (1990), ICFA, which has no direct power, could sometimes only stand on the sidelines and comment on the emergence of major new national plans. The lessons learnt, ICFA is keen to make sure that the EPLC debut on the world stage will be better choreographed. In addition to plans for new major experimental facilities, the Hamburg seminar also provided a valuable snapshot of the current scene and the directions in which ongoing research is poised to take. This covered existing facilities and projects, 'factories' to mass-produce specific particles, fixed target studies and non-accelerator experiments as well as the key EPLC development theme. B-physics, the study of particles containing the fifth, or 'beauty' (b) quark, emerged as an important thread running across several machine scenarios