Current Status of the J-PARC Project

From Japanese fiscal year JFY2001 a new accelerator project to provide high-intensity proton beams proceeded into its construction phase. This project, which is now called the J-PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex) project, is conducted under the cooperation of two institutions, KEK and JAERI. We set a goal to achieve 1 MW proton beams at 3 GeV and 0.75 MW beams at 50 GeV. The project will be completed in JFY2007, with the anticipated first beams in the spring of 2008. In this article I will describe a) the project itself, b) the progress in terms of civil engineering and accelerator construction, and c) examples of Day-1 experiments, in particular, in the area of nuclear and particle physics.