The town meeting at Darmstadt for the NuPECC long range plan
The European nuclear physics community met at Darmstadt (DE) on January 11th-13th to discuss and finalise the NuPECC Long Range Plan (LRP) 2017.
NuPECC is a European Expert Board for Nuclear Physics representing 21 countries. Its objective is to strengthen European collaboration in nuclear science through the promotion of nuclear physics and its trans-disciplinary uses and applications in collaborative ventures between research groups within Europe.
More than 270 scientists attended a very busy meeting in Darmstadt. The 3 day program was very interesting with about 20 different presentations on the future programs in nuclear physics and on the status of the European facilities including a presentation on ESFRI. Plenty of time was devoted to open discussions which were very lively and constructive. The 3 day program can be found here: https://indico.gsi.de/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=5177
Strong emphasis was given to the future large scale facilities foreseen in Europe in the forthcoming years. In particular, the FAIR facility at GSI is on schedule to start construction and to be ready by 2025. All the main radioactive beams facilities (SPIRAL2, HIE-ISOLDE, SPES) involve a large scientific community and are paving the way to a possible future EURISOL distributed facility. New facilities in the eastern part of Europe like ELI-NP close to Bucharest (RO) and the NICA at Dubna (RU) (which is combined with a Super Heavy element factory SHE) are expected as well.
The status and the perspectives of the different fields of hadronic and nuclear physics were widely presented and discussed by several working groups, which organised many dedicated meetings last year. These working groups included the following topics: hadron physics, properties of strong-interaction matter, nuclear structure and reaction dynamics, nuclear astrophysics, symmetries and fundamental interactions, applications and societal benefits.
The general European context within the EU programs, the wider international context in Asia and in USA and the nuclear physics program at CERN were also discussed.
As a result of this meeting, the LRP 2017 of NuPECC is close to completion and it will be published before summer. It will build on the previous ones published in 1991, 1997, 2004 and 2010. This LRP is expected to play a key role in giving Nuclear Physics the deserved visibility from the funding agencies and from other communities in the international general landscape.
