Construction status of the J-PARC project

From Japanese fiscal year JFY2001, which started on April 1, 2001, 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 in progress under a cooperation of two institutes, 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 construction period is 7 years, with anticipated first beams in the spring of 2008 In this article I will describe the project itself and the present status of the project.