The lively conference boasted nearly 600 participants between graduate students, postdocs, and professors, which filled the hallways and classrooms (and dorms) of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University now emptied of undergraduates who were off for summer break. Theorists, phenomenologists, and experimentalists for high energy, cosmology, neutrinos, and dark matter were all brought together to exchange ideas and results.
The venue was set right between CMU and Pitt and the dorms and even hotels were not expensive and most importantly entirely in walking distance. What a pleasure to wake up in the morning and just walk over to the venue. The bridge overt the street to Lawrence Hall and the three towers greeted us all in the morning.
Coming in with an interest of hearing about collider high energy physics, my appetites were more than satisfied, with five days worth of talks which were filled with several interesting experimental results: from plenaries discussing existing anomalies and excesses in the LHC data, precision measurements of the electroweak sector, Higgs physics, b physics, and dark sectors to the many parallel session talks that covered particular results and analyses in the field. Several symposia also tackled future Higgs factories and muon colliders from some of the leading experts in those fields. Christoph presented on the physics case for Higgs factories, which have excited much of the field and are the next big step after the HL-LHC. Talks from adjacent fields to mine, such as neutrinos or direct detection of dark matter or phenomenology, also helped to round out my view of the field as a whole.
Representatives from DoE and NSF were present, and reported the governments’ agencies’ responses to the P5 report. Importantly for high energy physicists, there appeared to be support for the off-shore Higgs factories, and we had already heard about the Statement of Intent for FCC-ee co-signed by the U.S. government and CERN just two weeks prior.
Representatives from DoE and NSF were present, and reported the governments’ agencies’ responses to the P5 report. Importantly for high energy physicists, there appeared to be support for the off-shore Higgs factories, and we had already heard about the Statement of Intent for FCC-ee co-signed by the U.S. government and CERN just two weeks prior.
The conference was of course not without many social events. We were hosted for a nice dinner on the last evening of the conference at the Heinz Music Hall foyer, showed below. Another dinner was hosted by the “friends of the LHC” at CMU and Pittsburgh, which was attended by many people from CMS.
After spending the last three years focusing on my analysis (along with classes, oral exams, and all of that), which we released a couple of months ago, this conference was a wonderful opportunity to get in touch with the rest of the field, expand my horizon, and get a sense of what interesting things are being done by the very many talented folks that make up this great field.