With increasing costs of niobium, helium, energy and raw material in general, it becomes mandatory to find less expensive ways to built and operate accelerators. This necessity not only applies to future colliders for high energy physics, but to any kind of particle accelerators (light source, high intensity hadrons sources…). This common necessity allowed regrouping most of the European accelerator labs R&D teams, in particular on Thin Films R&D. It was a mater or survival for this relatively small community, where labs activities are mainly centered on the building of big projects and R&D support keeps small.
There are also thin film activities in USA, Japan and China. Jlab published very encouraging results on Nb layers on Cu, they also have activities on Nb3Sn and multilayers. Jlab, Cornell, FNAL all had successful activities on Nb3Sn on Nb. They are now exploring alternative routes to achieve deposition on copper. Temple university, LANL and KEK have activities on MgB2. KeK has also activities on Nb3Sn and multilayers. Between Pekin University and IMP Lanzhou, China has activities in all these domains. Numerous academic laboratories collaborate with the SRF groups for theory, material development and/or characterization.
At the international level, all these groups try to coordinate through collaborative action like the TTC-thin film sub-group or SNOWMASS initiatives, which propose similar program as the IFAST one.
