European Strategy in Particle Physics
Since 2007, the High Energy Particle Physics Board of the European Physics Society (EPS) and the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA) have been organising jointly a half-day plenary session during the biannual EPS conference on High Energy Physics. This year’s session, which took place in Grenoble in the afternoon of 23 September, marked the start of the process for updating the European strategy in particle physics.
The first European strategy for particle physics was adopted by a special session of the CERN Council in July 2006. The Strategy was defined by 17 statements that were approved by Council and were contained in the Strategy Statement. The CERN Council also established its role of not only running an international laboratory in Geneva, but also in coordinating European particle physics activities, by the setting up of the European Strategy Session of Council. This role had already been foreseen in the original CERN Convention.
To update the current statement, the Strategy Session of the CERN Council recently set up a structure similar that which had produced the first statement. This consisted of a preparatory group, to compile the scientific and technical inputs; and a strategy group to form an updated strategy based on these inputs. The Scientific Secretary for the Strategy Session of the CERN Council will chair both groups, and the updated strategy will be submitted to CERN Council for approval in December 2012.
Input from the community is vital in producing such an update to the particle physics strategy. As a kick-off meeting for the update process, the ECFA-EPS joint session provided a snapshot of the recent past, current status and expectations for the near future in particle physics experiments and theory. The joint session was very well attended and all the presentations were followed by extensive lively discussions, which demonstrated the strong interest of the community. An open meeting dedicated to gathering input from the community is expected in the spring of 2012.
