Arriving the evening before the conference, I wandered through the University of Wisconsin campus and was amused to find “Der Rathskeller” at the Memorial Union, a German-style beer hall right on the lakefront. As someone who grew up in Germany, enjoying a Bratwurst and Sauerkraut on the terrace at sunset felt like a familiar welcome in the American Midwest. Looking at the German heritage in the US, though it does not come as a surprise :-).
The 32nd edition of the Lepton Photon Conference, one of the major events in particle physics, took place from August 25–29 at the Monona Terrace Convention Center in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. The center has been designed by the Wisconsin born famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and is right on the edge of one of Madison’s beautiful lakes.
The scientific program had a strong forward-looking focus. Plenary and parallel talks highlighted the High-Luminosity LHC and the need for a Higgs factory in the next decades. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN is currently the favored option, with the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) in China as another leading proposal. Right in the morning of the second day Christoph Paus convened the plenary Higgs Physics session which ended with an inspiring theory overview talk by Michael Peskin, professor at Stanford and co-author of An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. Christoph also gave an overview of the physics potential of FCC for precision electroweak measurements. Looking even further ahead, the community is actively exploring novel concepts such as muon colliders and plasma wakefield accelerators which were extensively discussed during the sessions..
But also the present physics results were highlighted. I presented recent CMS precision measurements with W and Z bosons and my own work on Rabbit, a framework that allows extracting these results in reduced time. Among the new results released at the conference (CMS news), one highlight was the most precise luminosity determination ever achieved at a bunched hadron collider, carried out by CMS. The measurement included a validation step based on Z boson measurements, which I had the opportunity to contribute to.
Beyond the conference itself, CERN Director-General designate Mark Thompson gave a symposium at the University of Wisconsin on the future of particle physics with the upcoming High-Luminosity LHC and the plans for FCC. Apart from the conference dinner on Wednesday we had some wonderful dinners during the week, the highlight maybe being our dinner with a bunch of FCC folks that was incredible difficult to organize, but in the end was a great evening with all kind of good stories.
As always, Lepton Photon combined new results, forward-looking discussions, and the chance to reconnect with colleagues. This year in Madison also carried special significance: it marked the 30th anniversary of the top quark discovery. Several physicists who had worked at the Tevatron back in the 1990s were in attendance, providing a sense of history and reminding us how far the field has come, and how ambitious the road ahead will be.