COMET - A submission to the 2020 update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics on behalf of the COMET collaboration

The search for charged lepton flavour violation (CLFV) has enormous discovery potential in probing new physics Beyondthe Standard Model(BSM). Among the muonic CLFV processes, $\mu \to e$ conversion is one of the most important processes, having several advantages compared to other such processes. We describe the COMETexperiment, which is searching for $\mu \to e$ conversion in a muonic atom at the J-PARCproton accelerator laboratory in Japan. The COMETexperiment has taken a staged approach; the first stage, COMETPhase-I, is currently under construction at J-PARC, and is aiming at a factor 100 improvement over the current limit. The second stage, COMETPhase-II is seeking another 100 improvement (a total of 10,000), allowing a single event sensitivity (SES) of $2.6 \times 10^{-17}$ with $2\times 10^{7}$ seconds of data-taking. Further improvements by one order of magnitude, which arise from refinements to the experimental design and operation, are being considered whilst staying within the originally-assumed beam power and beam time. Such a sensitivity could be translated into probing many new physics constructions up to $\mathcal{O}(10^{4})$ TeV energy scales, which would go far beyond the level that can be reached directly by collider experiments. The search for CLFV $\mu \to e$ conversion is thus highly complementary to BSM searches at the LHC.