CNRS AIL: Associated International laboratory

AIL is a CNRS tool for initiating and running international collaborations on well identified although broad topics. It is an attempt to increase the degree of collaborations and to create a wider researcher basis for future joint projects.

It is a formal network of laboratories between 2 countries with a simple but well defined structure and organization including provisions for budget allocation, co-direction, steering committee, scientific evaluation and intellectual property rights. It relies on nation to nation general research agreements. Based on a 4 years, renewable term, it has been tailored to the need of bilateral collaborations but can easily be extended to multi-lateral and multi-institution programs. The aim is to set up an AIL between France and Japan, and to possibly extend it later.

It is a virtual (or wall-less) laboratory: no new building is required, unless specific needs are met. Each collaborating laboratory becomes an AIL host providing the foreign researchers with the necessary support, very much as it would for a domestic visiting researcher. It is open to all researchers regardless of their laboratory being or not an AIL host laboratory.

Specific support for tenure researcher long term visits (from 1 month up to 1 year) and for hiring PhD students (3 years) and post-docs (2 years) are provided by both countries. The most sensitive issue of international collaboration namely “Project Continuity” is thus addressed through the space and time overlap of expertise and the sustained scientific direction and evaluation.

It has proven to be a quite unique and successful framework for many fields and in many countries. More than 15 AIL are running in the world on different topics like agriculture, genomics, gamma ray, catalyses, molecular engineering …

More specific to Japan, 2 AIL have already been set: one with Tokyo university on MEMS (1987) and one with AIST Tsukuba on humanoid robotics (2002). Beyond their scientific achievements and the visibility given to the programs, they have played a major role in improving the understanding between the communities and the internationalization of both institutions. Based on this successful experience, an AIL entitled

is being prepared between France and Japan which has both short and long term targets. It will cover the today needs of several teams conducting collaborative activities on ILC detector and accelerator R&D, LHC, neutrino, B physics, theory and computing. It intends also to provide a modest test-bench tackling practical issues raised by the international organization of the ILC world-wide project regardless of the selected host country.

On the French side, 5 host laboratories chosen both for (ILC-LHC related) scientific and geographical reasons are currently being contacted: LAPP (Annecy), LPNHE (Paris), LLR (Palaiseau), LAL (Orsay) and Dapnia (Saclay). On the Japanese side, KEK will be the main host laboratory, but other universities can also be appointed. %PDFLATEXIF% %ELSE% -- DenisPerretGallix - 29 Sep 2005

• IAL-presentation-2.pdf: IAL-presentation (pdf)