Editorial – From Particles to the Cosmos at EPS HEP 2017 in Venice
Close to a thousand physicists from all over the world gathered in July 2017 at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP) in Venice, Italy. The HEPP division of the EPS played the role of the International Organising Committee and the conference was organised by Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padova.
This was the 24th edition of this major biennial conference covering experimental and theoretical physics in the fields of particle physics and cosmology. The one-week program included parallel sessions, a special ECFA-EPS session, an award ceremony including the prestigious EPS HEP and Cocconi prizes, and plenary sessions. More than 470 parallel session talks distributed in up to nine parallel sessions covered astroparticle and multi-messengers physics, dark matter, flavour and symmetries, heavy-ion physics, Higgs boson and new physics, neutrino physics, QCD and hadronic physics, top and electroweak physics, dark energy and gravitational waves, quantum field and string theories, detectors and data handling, accelerators for high energy physics, outreach, education and diversity.
During the three days of plenary sessions and 36 overview talks, special emphasis was given to the interplay of particle physics, astroparticle physics and cosmology in the understanding of the origin of matter, forces, and structures in the Universe. The complementarity was seen to be particularly rich between the search for direct dark matter production at colliders and indirect searches in the cosmos. The conference was also the occasion to reveal the first set of major results from the LHC experiments with high statistics data taken in 2016. This has brought considerable progress in the measurements of the properties of the H boson and impressive precision on the physics in weak boson physics. For the H boson this included the first evidence (better than 3 σ) for the H → bb decay, the stand-alone observation (more than 5 σ) of the H → ττ decay, and first hints of the ttH-associated production. Various possible extensions of the scalar sector are now being explored as a possible portal to physics beyond the Standard Model or as indirect signature of supersymmetry, while searches for new particles are being pursued in the TeV range. Heavy flavour physics was also highlighted with the discovery of a doubly charmed baryon, as well as for intriguing hints of deviations from lepton-flavour universality. Neutrino physics remains very exciting as experiments are converging on the value of the CP-violating phase in that sector. The discovery of gravitational waves confirms a century-old prediction of general relativity and opens an entirely new observational window in astrophysics.
The next edition of the conference will take place from 10-17 July 2019 in Ghent, Belgium.
Yves Sirois
Chair of the EPS HEPP Division (up to EPS HEP2017)
