At the CERN Council Open Symposium on the European Strategy for Particle Physics in Krakow, around 500 particle physicists have been discussing the long-term prospect of the field.
This symposium comes on the wheels of the discovery of a new Higgs boson-consistent particle by CERN experiments, CMS and ATLAS, in July 2012. The discovery provides a new direction for future research on particle physics. Besides the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) findings that rocked the world, other fields like neutrino physics have witnessed significant developments over recent years.
Subject being discussed at Krakow include potential facilities under consideration to succeed the LHC, which is slated to run efficiently beyond 2020, potential facilities for neutrino science, and the relationship between between cosmic ray studies and accelerator-based research. Even though the LHC is at the start of its research agenda, the delay incurred to develop certain high-precision experiments and high-energy frontier research facilities necessitates the initiation of preliminary work as early as possible to maintain continuity.
The symposium signifies the first update of a strategy originally launched in 2006 with a vision to directing research into particle physics in the European region and encouraging European contribution in projects carried out in other regions. The input from this symposium will be refined by a CERN Council nominated strategy group into a draft strategy update, which will then be analyzed in March 2013 by the CERN Council. The final report will be delivered in May 2013 to the Council in Brussels at a meeting to be held in conjunction with a ministerial-level meeting of the European Competitiveness Council.
According to Rolf Heuer, CERN Director-General, the European strategy for particle physics represents the global nature of particle physics, ensuring the deployment of European resources in an optimal and responsible way and their integration into a global vision of particle physics.
Source: http://www.cern.ch