The USA has thus far failed to follow up with a successor to the Tevatron particle accelerator. It canceled the Superconducting Super Collider and it sat back while CERN built the Large Hadron Collider. Now, a tiny country like Japan, with one-third the GDP of the US, may take up the opportunity to build the International Linear Collider. Although the US is committed to collaborating with the LHC and ILC projects, can it do better? Can it take demonstrate leadership in particle physics, as it did back in 1969 with the Tevatron?
The LHC and ILC provide very different conditions to produce and allow us to study particles. The ILC has the potential to reveal new details and possibly particles that are invisible to LHC experiments.