Upon the restricted session of March 21st 2024, the CERN Council launched the process for the update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics (ESPPU), steered by the European Strategy Group (ESG) - more information here.
The IRFU and IN2P3 are jointly organising the contribution of the French community (steered by Nathalie Besson and Laurent Vacavant), which is expected to be a "bottom-up" exercise with input directly issued from the community.
The contributions are expected to cover:
- the preferred option for the next collider at CERN but also alternative options in order of priority if the chosen preferred plan proves not to be feasible or competitive;
- priority areas for smaller-scale experiments to be carried out at CERN and in national laboratories;
- in general, all points deemed relevant to the field, including R&D on accelerators, detectors and computation, theoretical physics, improvement of the sustainability of accelerator-based particle physics (and minimisation of the environmental impact), as well as outreach and training actions to attract and train new generations of physicists, engineers and technicians.
In addition to the contributions directly submitted to the ESPPU (individual, groups, collaborations, across the different topics mentioned above), the IN2P3 and IRFU propose that the French community produce and submit a joint document summarising its input.
Working groups have been set up around 4 scientific themes to collect and synthesise the community's contributions. While being based on existing IRNs and GDRs, they are obviously not restricted to these research federations,
WG1: Standard model and beyond [in association with the IRN Terascale]
WG2: Flavour physics and tests of fundamental interactions [in connection to the GDR Intensity Frontier]
WG3: Neutrinos (especially long-baseline) [in connection with the IRN Neutrinos]
WG4: QCD and heavy-ion collisions [in association with the GDR QCD]
A fifth transverse group is devoted to the study of future collider scenarios (GTS), and its main goal is to address the first point of the strategy's mandate (in italics above). The GTS is expected to closely interact with the thematic WGs.
WG1 will be steered by Fabrice Couderc, Marie-Hélène Genest and Ana Teixeira; we invite and encourage contributions to the ESPPU French community contribution.
The contributions must be synthetic (2 pages maximum) and may come from projects, laboratories, various groups or individuals.
A webform has been prepared to collect these contributions at the CC-IN2P3:
(Further details can be found in this document.)
Contributions can be submitted until October 25th.
At the Fall meeting of the Terascale, scheduled for 13-15 November 2024, a session will be devoted to discuss the submitted contributions.
A first summary of the community's contribution will be presented at an open symposium (January 20th-21st, 2025, at Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, Jussieu - Paris); the final goal is a 10-page document summarising the French community input to the ESPPU to be submitted by March 2025, 2 of which will be written by the WG1.
