Three words to summarize a conference

Impressive, exciting and eye-opening. This is how I would summarize the European Physics Society (EPS) particle physics conference that is ending today in Vienna.

The participants were treated to an impressive amount of new data. Not only had the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN finalised most of their analyses on the entire set of data collected prior to the long shutdown of the last two years, but they had also already started analysing the new data. This confirms that everything, from hardware to software, is up and running after extensive upgrades, repairs and improvements.

All the tools for physics analysis - simulations, data acquisition systems, trigger menus, calibration and analysis algorithms – are already performing beautifully at the new collision energy of 13 TeV. The experiments are clearly in a position to take up the analyses where they had left them with the 8 TeV data. True, there are no signs for new physics anywhere yet but LHCb, CMS and ATLAS all have little hints that will soon be elucidated with the new data.

Conference dinner last night at the beautiful Schönbrunn palace in Vienna (Credit: Gertrud Konrad)

A wealth of new experiments and results were also presented at the conference on dark matter and dark energy. New avenues are also explored to broaden the searches in the hope of accounting for the 95% of the content of the Universe that is still completely unknown. Giant steps have already been taken and major breakthroughs are expected in the very near future. Developments are also expected in the neutrino sector, a prolific research domain that has been most puzzling and confusing for many years.

As stated by Pierre Binetruy, a theorist working on cosmology: “The simultaneous discovery of the Higgs and confirmation of some of the basic features of inflation (the rapid expansion that followed the Big Bang) has opened a new era in the common understanding of cosmology and particle physics". It is clear that we are on the eve of major advances and discoveries. The next conference is sure to be an event not to be missed.

Pauline Gagnon

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