Learned societies worldwide to plan the future of particle physics

Three community driven initiatives in 2013 have provided an opportunity to high-energy particle “to build a compelling science case for major research facilities in Asia, Europe and the US. They identified ways to increase the scientific return on society’s investment and to spread the benefits of forefront physics research to developing countries.”
An article in the January/February 2014 CERN Courier describes how learned societies have provided valuable input into the planning process for future high-energy particle physics facilities…
In January 2013, a working group of the CERN Council met in Erice, Italy, to draft an updated strategy for medium…

SCOAP3 launched on 1 January 2014

As of 1 January 2014, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics [SCOAP3] has become operational.

SCOAP3 contributes to the on-going evolution of the publication landscape by proposing a completely new approach for the high-energy and particle physics community. SCOAP3 is a new paradigm in scientific publication, relying on the redirection of funding from a large number of organisations and universities in order to cover publication expenses…

A new era in Particle Physics

These are exciting times. In July 2013, one year after the discovery of a Higgs boson with the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN, about 750 particle physicists met at the international EPS Conference on High Energy Physics in Stockholm. This meeting was organised jointly by the EPS High Energy and Particle Physics Division [EPS-HEPP] and a local organising committee. The anniversary of the Higgs discovery was celebrated with the award of the EPS-HEPP Prize to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations and to M. Della Negra, P. Jenni, and T. Virdee for their leadership roles in these…

IPAC’14

The 5th International Particle Accelerator Conference [IPAC’14] will take place from 15 to 20 June 2014 in Dresden, Germany.

The conference is organised by the European Physical Society Accelerator Group [EPS-AG] and is a forum for important stakeholders working in the field of particle accelerators to discuss the latest developments in research and technology. IPAC’14 marks the return of this important conference to Europe since its second edition IPAC’11. The conference…

News on the Open Access front

In June this year the American Physical Society [APS] has decided not to participate as a publishing partner in the SCOAP3 initiative launched by CERN as an Open Access possible model for the very international particle-physics community.
Of course, this does not mean that the APS will abandon its long-standing commitment to Open Access. However this decision signals, once more, how steep the road is to achieve sustainable Open Access for scientific publishers. Despite the universally recognised merits of the Open Access principle to grant unrestricted access to the results of…

SIF Fermi Prize for decisive contribution to LHC discoveries

The 2013 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society [SIF] has been awarded to Pierluigi Campana (INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati), Simone Giani (CERN), Fabiola Gianotti (CERN), Paolo Giubellino (INFN Torino) and Guido Tonelli (Università di Pisa and INFN Pisa), “for the outstanding results that the five large international collaboration experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider [LHC] – LHCb, TOTEM, ATLAS, ALICE, CMS – have achieved during the first period of LHC data taking under the successful guidance of the…

Nigel Lockyer to lead the Fermilab

Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada’s TRIUMF laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia, has been selected to become the next director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory [Fermilab].

N. Lockyer has a long-standing interest in medical-physics projects, including proton therapy for cancer patients. Initially an experimental particle physicist, he has directed TRIUMF since May 2007. Under his leadership…

International Master classes in Particle Physics

Master classes are a unique opportunity for high-school students, where they can hunt particles at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] and analyse real data from the experiments. Each year, in spring, research institutes and universities around the world open their doors and invite students for daylong visits. This year’s International Master classes were organized in March, under the auspices of the International Particle Physics Outreach Groups [IPPOG], and attracted more than 10 000 students.
In the Master class, students gained insight into the international organization of modern research in…

Updating the European Strategy for Particle Physics

On 21-26 January 2013 the European Strategy Group met in Erice, Italy to draft an update of the medium and long-term European Strategy for Particle Physics to be submitted shortly for approval by the CERN Council. The Erice “retreat” followed the Open Symposium of Krakow, Poland, in September 2012.

This timely strategy document comes soon after the discovery of the long awaited Higgs-like boson at the LHC and coincides with the LHC shutdown until the end of 2014…

Vienna Conference on Instrumentation

The Vienna Conference on Instrumentation [VCI] will take place n 11-15 February 2013 and will present the newest developments of detectors for particle, astro-particle and nuclear physics and their applications in biology, medicine, neutron scattering and synchrotron radiation.

The Conference will have plenary sessions with invited talks giving en overview of new detector development. The Conference Organizers particularly encourage contributions relating to associated detector electronics…

SpacePart12

The 4th International Conference on Particle and Fundamental Physics in Space [SpacePart12] will be held on 5-7 November 2012 at CERN. The event, part of a series, which has been held since 2002, brings together space scientists and space policy makers from around the world to exchange views on the developments of space related science and technology programs.
Scientific topics of SpacePart12 will be: the 100th anniversary of Cosmic Ray discovery; status and open issues linking particle physics and the observation of the universe; the multi-messenger universe; the dark universe; …

Debating future of particle physics

The Open Symposium on the European Strategy for Particle Physics was held in the beautiful town of Krakow on 10-12 September this year. This event – organised under the aegis of the European Strategy Preparatory Group – attracted around 500 particle physicists from across the world, with the aim of discussing the next research instruments and other future prospects for high energy physics.

The wide-ranging programme focused on the recent discovery of the Higgs-like particle at CERN…