By far the most important event for particle physics during the next few years will be the beginning of operation of the LHC, now planned for 2007. Besides that, here are various sources of information about what else will be going on, especially in the U.S.:<\/p>\n
A National Research Council committee called EPP 2010: Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century<\/A> was formed last year, charged to:<\/p>\n “Identify, articulate, and prioritize the scientific questions and opportunities that define elementary-particle physics.”<\/p>\n and<\/p>\n “Recommend a 15-year implementation plan with realistic, ordered priorities to realize these opportunities.”<\/p>\n It has already had a couple meetings, and presentations to these meetings are available here<\/A>. They plan to have more public meetings this year and produce a report by the end of the year.<\/p>\n If you want to follow the details of current and future funding for particle physics in the U.S., there’s a lot of information in the presentations to this week’s HEPAP meeting<\/A>. The overall picture is for particle physics funding to decrease over the next few years, under the pressure of the huge U.S. budget deficits. Beyond a proposed 3.1% cut for particle physics next year, the DOE is planning for another 3.7% cut in its overall science budget over the following five years. In this environment it is very difficult to find funding for new projects. One proposed new one, called BTeV, which was to study B-physics at the Tevatron, is slated for cancellation. Another, RSVP, a search for rare decays at Brookhaven, is being reevaluated. <\/p>\n The DOE budget document points out that the future of Fermilab is a problematic issue. Tevatron operations are slated to wind down in FY 2009, when the LHC should start producing data. The new NuMI\/MINOS neutrino beam and detectors will still be running then, but it is not clear for how long. Unless a major new machine (such as the ILC linear collider) is sited at Fermilab, it’s not clear what the laboratory will be doing after 2010. Such a major new machine would be expensive, so it’s not something that could be financed out of a DOE HEP budget that continues to decline. There’s a comment about this in Jochen Weller’s weblog<\/A>.<\/p>\n There’s a conference this week in Aspen on The Highest Energy Physics<\/A> and some of the talks are already on-line<\/A>.<\/p>\n Finally, Serkan Cabi at MIT has put together a nice collection of links to videos of physics seminars<\/A>, he also has a weblog<\/A>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By far the most important event for particle physics during the next few years will be the beginning of operation of the LHC, now planned for 2007. Besides that, here are various sources of information about what else will be … Continue reading