Annual Phenomenology Symposia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Springs 2011 and 2012

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funding for the PHENO 2010, PHENO 2011, and PHENO 2012 conferences to be held each May at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. These annual PHENO conferences will be devoted, in large part, to studying the physics that might emerge from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, and the connections between these experimental results and results from other collider- and non-collider-based experiments in both elementary particle physics and astrophysics and cosmology. After nearly twenty years of plannning and construction, the LHC is now the highest-energy collider in the world, and results from this machine are expected to provide important insight into some of the most pressing questions that confront particle physics at the TeV scale. NSF support for this conference is also vital in order to enable young physicists to attend the Pheno Symposia. Indeed, the PHENO Conferences are nothing less than the largest professional student meetings in high-energy physics in the United States. Most of the student participants also present their research work in the parallel sessions, providing them with valuable opportunities to meet their peers, gain valuable research feedback, and develop contacts with senior physicists. To encourage young participants to attend, the tradition of the PHENO conferences is that graduate students can attend the PHENO Conferences free of charge, and postdocs have a reduced conference fee compared to more senior participants. As a result, many physicists gave their first conference talk at a PHENO Conference.