This years conference of the European Physics Society (EPS) on High Energy Physics (HEP) took place in Hamburg. It was a wonderful showing of the present state of high energy physics. I personally had not visited the EPS in a while and it was a treat to meet all my colleagues in the wonderful setting at the University of Hamburg in Rotherbaum. The AudiMax was very spacious and simply ideal for this large event of over 800 registered participants.
Apart from the great fresh results from experiments and theorists, the planning of the future took a significant part of the agenda. Gavin Salam gave a great summary and my personal favorites are included. My conclusions from this conference are:
- g-2 measurement: 2nd result is impressive and consistent with first from FNAL, but the Lattice QCD calculations remain discrepant,
- Belle 2 sees ‘lucky’ evidence for B+->K+ nu nubar,
- LHCb/BaBar discrepancies in in the B sector with R(K*), R(D*) have basically disappeared, too bad
- the P5 process in the US is having its ripples in Europe
It is a pleasure to see how the g-2 experiment now run at FNAL it pushing out its second big result with substantially more data. It remains consistent with the first result and the final result obtained during the original run of the experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The data taking for g-2 has been completed on July 9, 2023 but the analysis of the full dataset is anticipated for 2025.
The future in HEP looks very well set until the high luminosity option of the LHC completes, and after that there are plenty of ideas but funding and the different viewpoints in the community make the picture much less obvious. In my opinion the FCC with its combined FCC-ee and FCC-hh programs looks like the most obvious future to me rich in precision physics and additional discovery potential… but there are people that doubt that we can convince the funding agencies to get the money and others that prefer other projects, like a muon collider. With the feasibility study of the FCC just beyond its midterm point it is obvious that nothing should be decided before the project is really well defined. The present status as presented by CERN is very impressive, sites are selected and the main ring design (90.7 km length) has been locked in. The precision electroweak program (mainly running at the Z pole and the WW threshold) of the FCC-ee is often underestimated and remains a feature that only the FCC project can offer. Improving previous measurements in precision by over two orders of magnitude is something that I find simply incredible.
Meeting the colleagues from DESY and good friends from ATLAS, CMS and theory always gets me to think more about what else would be exciting to do.A small pitch to the DESY computing folks about our A2rchi project was also quite productive.
