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Strategy drafting under way in Bad Honnef

Today, senior figures in European particle physics have gathered in the small town of Bad Honnef, Germany, for a week of intense discussions that will guide the future of fundamental exploration. The “strategy drafting session” marks the final stage of the update of the European strategy for particle physics. Convened by the European Strategy Group (ESG) — which includes a scientific delegate from each of CERN’s member and associate-member states, directors and representatives of major European laboratories and organisations and invitees from outside Europe – the 60 or so attendees are tasked with identifying a set of priorities and recommendations to the CERN Council.

The ESG, a special body set up by the CERN Council approximately every five years, was invited to formulate an update of the European strategy for particle physics in September 2017. A call for input in 2018 attracted 160 submissions, which were discussed at an open symposium in Granada, Spain, in May 2019. The ESG then published a 200-page briefing book which distilled the input into an objective scientific summary and will form the basis for discussions in Germany this week.

The start of a new project in the early 2040s is crucial to keep the community motivated and engaged
Fabiola Gianotti

The focus of the latest strategy update, the third since 2005, is which major project should follow the LHC once its high-luminosity phase comes to an end in the late 2030s. There is broad support for an electron—positron collider that will explore the Higgs sector in detail, as well as for a high-energy proton–proton collider at CERN. In Europe, the possible options are the Compact Linear Collider and the Future Circular Collider, while an International Linear Collider (ILC) in Japan and a large Circular Electron-Positron Collider in China are also contenders. The strategy update will also consider non-collider experiments, computing, instrumentation and other key aspects of growing importance to the field such as energy efficiency and communication.

The previous strategy update, which concluded in 2013, made several high-priority recommendations: the full exploitation of the LHC, including the high-luminosity upgrade of the machine and detectors; R&D and design studies for a future energy-frontier machine at CERN; establishing a neutrino programme at CERN for physicists to develop detectors for experiments at accelerator-based neutrino facilities around the world; and the welcoming of a proposal from Japan to discuss the possible participation of Europe in the ILC. The first three are well under way, while a decision on the ILC still rests with the Japanese government. Other conclusions of the 2013 update included the need for closer collaboration with the astroparticle and nuclear physics communities, which has been met for example via the recently launched centre for astroparticle physics theory (EuCAPT) and the new Joint ECFA-NuPECC-APPEC Seminar series, JENAS. There was also a call for greater scientific diversity, leading to the CERN-led Physics Beyond Colliders initiative, which will also form a central part of this week’s discussions.

The recommendations from the ESG are due to formally be approved by the CERN Council on 25 May at an event in Budapest, Hungary.

During her annual address to personnel on 14 January, CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti acknowledged the enormous efforts that have gone into the strategy update, and said that she hoped that a recommendation on CERN’s next major collider would be among the ESG’s priorities.

“The start of a new project in the early 2040s is crucial to keep the community motivated and engaged,” said Gianotti, noting that CERN and Europe should also be open to participate in projects at the forefront of particle physics elsewhere in the world. “The Higgs boson is a guaranteed deliverable. It is related to the most obscure and problematic sector of the Standard Model and carries special quantum numbers and a new type of interaction. It is therefore a unique door into new physics, and one that can only be studied at colliders.”

Brookhaven to host Electron-Ion Collider

RHIC tunnel — The US Department of Energy has selected a plan whereby accelerator infrastructure at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory (pictured) will be reconfigured to boast a new electron storage ring in addition to existing infrastructure for the acceleration of heavy ions. Credit: BNL

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York, has been selected as the site for the planned Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The decision, announced by the US Department of Energy (DOE) on 9 January, will see the laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) reconfigured to include a new electron storage ring to facilitate electron-ion collisions. Scheduled to enter operation at the end of the decade, the new electron-ion collider will pivot BNL’s physics focus from the study of the quark-gluon plasma to nuclear femtography.

BNL has edged out competition to host the EIC from the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Virginia, which boasts the recently upgraded Continuous Electron-Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). Under the JLab proposal, CEBAF would have been augmented with a new heavy-ion accelerator. JLab is now expected to be a major partner in the project and take the lead in aspects of accelerator R&D. The project is foreseen to cost between $1.6bn and $2.6bn, with first physics planned in 2029 or 2030, following the completion of RHIC’s science programme at the STAR and newly upgraded sPHENIX experiments. “Our plan, working with the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics, remains unchanged,” says BNL’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics Berndt Mueller: “to complete the RHIC science mission by bringing sPHENIX into operation for three years of data taking.”

Nuclear femtography

EIC will perform precision “nuclear femtography” by zeroing in on the substructure of quarks and gluons in heavy ions using collisions with high-energy electrons, in a comparable manner to the seminal studies of the proton using electron-proton collisions at DESY’s HERA accelerator between 1992 and 2007. While HERA ran at a centre-of-mass energy of 318 GeV, the EIC will operate from 20 to 140 GeV. “The upper centre-of-mass energy limit is chosen to be sufficient for access to the predicted gluon saturation regime in electron-heavy nucleus collisions,” says Mueller, referring to the state known as a colour-glass condensate, a nonlinear regime of quantum chromodynamics where the rate of gluon recombination rivals that at which gluons are radiated. “The lower centre-of-mass energy limit is optimised for the three-dimensional imaging of quark and gluon distributions in the proton and other nuclei, which will utilise the much higher luminosity projected for the EIC compared to HERA,” continues Mueller. “If required by the evolving physics programme, the energy range of the BNL EIC could be raised in the future, for example by increasing the strength of the magnets in the hadron ring.”

The lower energy limit is optimised for the three-dimensional imaging of quark and gluon distributions
Berndt Mueller

The selection of BNL allows work to begin on EIC’s conceptual design, but is not a final approval, with the project still required to clear several hurdles relating to its design, cost and construction schedule. Meanwhile, a complementary project, the Electron-Ion Collider of China (EicC), which primarily targets sea quarks rather than gluons, is also moving forward, though on a longer timescale. The EicC garnered publicity in December with news that design work will proceed with a view to beginning construction at a new campus in Huizhou, in Guangdong province in southern China. First physics is foreseen towards the end of the next decade.

“This brings to conclusion the hard work over the last 20 years to make the case for an EIC, and gives for the community the signal to start finalising the design and construct the EIC over the coming years,” says BNL’s Elke-Caroline Aschenauer. “To finally have the opportunity to image quarks and gluons, and their interactions, and to explore the new QCD frontier of strong colour fields in nuclei – to understand how matter at its most fundamental level is made – is the best new year present one can imagine.”

Croatia becomes an associate member of CERN

Vesna Batistic Kos and Fabiola Gianotti — **Strong partners** Vesna Batistic Kos, ambassador of Croatia to the United Nations in Geneva (left), and CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti exchanged signed agreements on 10 October. Credit: J Ordan/CERN

On 10 October CERN welcomed the Republic of Croatia as an Associate Member State, following receipt of official notification that Croatia has completed its internal approval procedures in respect of an agreement signed on 28 February.

“It is a great pleasure to welcome Croatia into the CERN family as an associate member. Croatian scientists have made important contributions to a large variety of experiments at CERN for almost four decades, and as an associate member, new opportunities open up for Croatia in scientific collaboration, technological development, education and training,” said CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti.

Researchers from Croatia have contributed to many experiments at CERN, and a cooperation agreement concluded in 2001 increased the country’s participation in CERN’s research and educational programmes. As an Associate Member State, Croatia will be represented at the CERN Council and be entitled to attend meetings of the finance committee and the scientific policy committee. Nationals of Croatia will be eligible to apply for limited-duration positions as staff members and fellows, while firms offering goods and services originating from Croatia will be entitled to bid for CERN contracts, creating opportunities for industrial collaboration in advanced technologies.

Croatia joins India, Lithuania, Pakistan, Turkey and Ukraine as Associate Member States, while Cyprus and Slovenia are Associate Member States in the pre-stage to membership.

2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for cosmic perspectives

**Profound view** Left to right: Laureates James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. Credits: D Applewhite/Princeton; Inamori Foundation/ESO; BBVA Foundation.

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2019 has recognised two independent bodies of work that have transformed our view of the universe and humanity’s place in it. One half of the SEK 9 million prize, announced on 8 October in Stockholm, was granted to James Peebles of Princeton University for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology, while the other was shared between Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz of the universities of Geneva and Cambridge for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star.

Peebles was instrumental in turning cosmology into the precision science it is today, with its ever closer links to collider and particle physics in general. Following the unexpected discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in 1965, he and others at Princeton used it to support the idea that the universe began in a hot, dense state. While the idea of a “big bang” was already many years old, Peebles paired it with concrete physics processes such as nucleosynthesis and described the role of temperature and density in the formation of structure. With others, he arrived at a model accounting for the density fluctuations in the CMB showing a series of acoustic peaks, which would demonstrate that the universe is geometrically flat and that ordinary matter constitutes just 5% of its total matter and energy content. In the early 1980s, Peebles was the first to consider non-relativistic “cold” dark matter and its effect on structure formation, and he went on to reintroduce Einstein’s forsaken cosmological constant – work that underpins today’s Lambda Cold Dark Matter model of cosmology.

Mayor and Queloz’s discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star in the Milky Way opened a new field of study. 51 Pegasi b lies 50 light years from Earth and takes just four days to complete its orbit. It was spotted by tracking how it and its star orbit around their common centre of gravity: a subtle wobbling seen from Earth whose speed can be measured from the starlight via the Doppler effect. The problem is that the radial velocities are extremely low. Mayor mounted his first spectrograph on a telescope at the Haute-Provence Observatory near Marseille in 1977, but it was only sensitive to velocities above 300 ms^–1 – too high to see a planet pulling on its star. It took almost two decades of work by him and his group to strike success, with doctoral student Queloz tasked with developing new methods to increase the machine’s light sensitivity. Today, more than 4000 exoplanets with a vast variety of forms, sizes and orbits have been discovered in our galaxy using the radial-velocity method and the newer technique of transit photometry, challenging ideas about planetary formation.

KAGRA complete

The construction of Japan’s first gravitational-wave (GW) detector, KAGRA, was finished on 4 October. Following agreement with the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, KAGRA will now participate in their third joint observation run, which began in April. The detector, which was built by the University of Tokyo, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and KEK, is the world’s fourth major GW detector, alongside LIGO in Washington state and Louisiana and Virgo in Italy. One of a suite of detectors in the Kamioka Observatory in northern Japan, KAGRA is also the first GW detector to operate at cryogenic temperatures, improving sensitivity at frequencies around 100 Hz – an important feature for proposed third-generation detectors such as the Einstein Telescope in Europe and the Cosmic Explorer in the US.

Spiro awarded Lagarrigue Prize

The 2018 André Lagarrigue Prize has been awarded to Michel Spiro, research director emeritus at CEA, for the exemplary nature of his career, from both a scientific and managerial point of view. Spiro contributed, among other things, to the discovery of the W and Z bosons with the UA1 experiment, was the initiator and spokesperson of the EROS experiment, and played a major role in the GALLEX experiment. He has held several senior positions at CEA and CNRS and from 2010–2013 was president of the CERN Council.

APS announces 2020 prizes

Wesley Smith of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and member of the CMS collaboration, has won the American Physical Society (APS) 2020 W K H Panofsky Prize “for the development of sophisticated trigger systems for particle-physics experiments, which enabled measuring the detailed partonic structure of the proton using the ZEUS experiment at HERA and led to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the completion of the Standard Model with the CMS experiment at the LHC”.

The 2020 J J Sakurai Prize for theoretical particle physics went to Pierre Sikivie of the University of Florida for seminal work recognising the potential visibility of the invisible axion, devising novel methods to detect it, and for theoretical investigations of its cosmological implications.

In the accelerator arena, the 2020 Robert R Wilson Prize was awarded to Bruce Carlsten of Los Alamos National Laboratory for the discovery and subsequent implementation of emittance compensation in photo-injectors “that has enabled the development of high-brightness, X-ray free electron lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source”.

Among several other prizes awarded in the particle, nuclear, astrophysics and related fields, the 2020 Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics went to Matt Pyle of the University of California at Berkeley for his development of high-resolution ultra-low-threshold cryogenic detectors for dark-matter searches.

Nikhef reappoints Bentvelsen

Stan Bentvelsen has been reappointed for a second five-year term as director of Nikhef in the Netherlands. Bentvelsen, an experimental physicist on ATLAS and an academic at the University of Amsterdam, first became director in 2014 and has overseen Nikhef’s involvement in international projects such as KM3NeT, XENON, Auger and a test facility of the proposed Einstein Telescope. He plans “to continue to open doors to new physics through diversification of experiments, both accelerator-based and other detectors, from physics to astroparticle physics.”

Gianotti elected for second term

On 12 December, the CERN Council unanimously decided to appoint Fabiola Gianotti as Director-General (DG) of CERN for a second term of office of five years, with effect from 1 January 2021. “I am deeply grateful to the CERN Council for their renewed trust,” she said in a statement. “The following years will be crucial for laying the foundations of CERN’s future projects and I am honoured to have the opportunity to work with the CERN Member States, Associate Member States, other international partners and the worldwide particle-physics community.” Gianotti, who is CERN’s first female DG, has been a research physicist at CERN since 1994 and was ATLAS spokesperson from March 2009 to February 2013 during the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Max Planck Medal for Buras

Andrzej Buras of the Technical University of Munich has been awarded the Max Planck Medal by the German Physical Society for his outstanding contributions to applied quantum field theory, especially in flavour physics and quantum chromodynamics.

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