“The United States will have to cede leadership in certain areas of particle physics,” said Carsten Heeger, a physicist at Yale University who serves as P5 vice chair. “It’s going to have an impact not only on the ground, but also outside of it.”
All of that has failed, and the draft report calls for the federal government to take steps already underway, including increasing the luminosity and collision rate of the Large Hadron Collider to better study the Higgs and other rare phenomena. We are asking you to maintain the project’s policy. continues to build ; Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a telescope in Chile designed to create time-lapse videos of the universe. And a limited version of DUNE.
Because these projects last for decades, the committee emphasized support for young scientists who will eventually take over the projects. “They are the future,” Dr. Murayama said.
The Department of Energy’s High Energy Physics Advisory Committee is scheduled to vote on the draft report Friday afternoon. If the report is accepted, the committee will focus on gaining support for the project from within and outside the physics community. Dr. Murayama especially hoped it would attract the attention of staff who interact with members of Congress about how to vote on the department’s budget.
“Basic research is difficult to sell,” says Dr. Murayama. “It’s not an immediate benefit to society.” But the payoff is worth it, he added. Particle physics revolutionized medical applications, materials science, and even his creation of the iPhone and the World Wide Web.
But Dr. Murayama says the benefits go beyond the field’s impact on society. “Particle physics is at the heart of who we are and who we are,” he said, adding that whether we are physicists or not, all of us can “understand why we exist.” “We want to understand where it comes from and where it’s going,” he added. ”