University-Based Detector Research and Development for the International Linear Collider

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At the start of the millenium, the world's particle physicists arrived at a consensus that an International Linear Collider (ILC) should be the next major facility for high energy physics. Since then, candidate technologies for the accelerator were developed, the global community has agreed on the technology to be used and a global center to coordinate the completion of the design is now forming. Realizing the vision of the ILC will be a great challenge both technically and in timeliness. The technical challenges lie in both detector and accelerator areas and derive from the need for high luminosity and high precision of measurement. The timeliness challenge lies in the need to have significant overlap with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) if the full synergy of the two approaches to the energy frontier is to be achieved. The detectors for the ILC are highly challenging. This is not always fully appreciated. While many advances in detector technology were required for the LHC experiments, different challenges must be addressed for the ILC experiments. To meet these technical challenges will require the development of conceptual designs for the detectors in the next few years.This proposal seeks to take an important step towards that goal. It includes a number of projects to be carried out by many diverse university groups and laboratories. The projects address key aspects of the detector requirements, including the development of important technologies for all the detector subsystems and the software needed to evaluate them. International groups are now coalescing around several detector concepts, and most of the projects are directly applicable to one or more of these. As is essential for the ILC, there is close communication between the US investigators and their colleagues abroad.This program will have scientific impact beyond the ILC. The detector R&D will lead to advances in a number of technical fronts. Detector technologies optimized to perform precision measurements in the low-radiation environment of a linear collider will have applications in other areas of high energy physics, as well as in other fields. The collaborating groups have a strong history of outreach to undergraduates and K-12 students and teachers. The work supported by this proposal will be integrated into these outreach efforts.