Chapter 1 of the Technical Design Report, Executive Summary:
The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a 200–500 GeV (extendable to 1 TeV) centre-of-mass high-luminosity linear electron-positron collider, based on 1.3 GHz superconducting radio-frequency (SCRF)
accelerating technology. Its parameters have been set by physics requirements first outlined in 2003, updated in 2006, and thoroughly discussed over many years with the physics user community. The physics parameters have been reviewed continuously and found to be robust to advances in the science, including the recent discovery of a Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
The collider design is the result of nearly twenty years of R&D. The heart of the ILC, the superconducting cavities, is based on over a decade of pioneering work by the TESLA collaboration in the 1990s. Some other aspects were based on the R&D carried out for the JLC/GLC and NLC projects, which were based on room-temperature accelerating structures. Since 2005, the design of the ILCaccelerator has continued as a worldwide international collaboration coordinated by the Global Design Effort (GDE) under a mandate from the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA).
Drawing on the resources of over 300national laboratories, universities and institutes worldwide, the GDE produced the ILC Reference Design Report (RDR) in August 2007. The work done by the GDE during the RDR phase identified several high-risk challenges that required R&D, which have since been the focus of the worldwide activity during the Technical Design Phase. In parallel with the accelerator effort, detailed baseline designs of two detectors have been developed by large international teams as a result of intense detector R&D under the coordination of the Research Directorate, also established by a mandate of ICFA.


The complete TDR and further information can be downloaded via the links below: