In a day of meetings that could produce an impact for years to come, the National Academies' panel on Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century (EPP 2010) assembled in One West on Monday morning to

DESY Director Albrecht Wagner at yesterday's EPP 2010 meeting.

begin listening — listening to how the national high-energy physics program fits into an international context; how Europe and Japan view issues of international connections; how Fermlab envisions its own future; how the proposed International Linear Collider is intertwined with all issues.

"We're not trying to make decisions experiment-by-experiment," said EPP 2010 chair Harold Shapiro of Princeton University. "Our goal is to establish broad priorities in the major fields of high-energy physics, in a scientific, international and budgetary context. We hope to suggest sensible strategies."

The panel's charge, from the National Academies' Board on Physics and Astronomy, involves prioritizing scientific questions, and recommending a 15-year implementation plan with realistic, ordered priorities. In its two-year study, the panel has met previously in Washington DC (Nov. 30, 2004) and at SLAC (Jan. 31, 2005). The next meeting will be at Cornell University's Laboratory

Fermilab Director Mike Witherell at yesterday's EPP 2010 meeting.

for Experimental Particle Physics (Aug. 2).

Fermilab Director Michael Witherell emphasized that the field of particle physics sees "a scientific revolution in the making," with collider physics able to attack all the major themes in the challenge ahead: the quantum vacuum, the Higgs search, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions. Tight budgets have led to optimizing the operating program, but US high-energy physics "currently provides outstanding science for the investment."
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-- Mike Perricone

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Scientists describe such a collision with unambiguous evidence as a "rare event," which may be an understatement. For example, out of hundreds of millions of particle collisions in one experiment, an analysis found that only 80 collisions or "events" merited further study as scientists search for evidence of "jet quenching," a phenomenon that may indicate the existence of quark-gluon plasma. Other research into such exotic physics phenomena as "strangelets" needs to go through similar search processes.

Compounding the complexity of the search is the fact that the data files are on mass storage systems around the world, so locating and extracting these scientific needles from a virtual haystack of information would be very time-consuming and labor-intensive. For example, the brute-force approach of reading every record of the petabytes of distributed data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider experiment called STAR at Brookhaven National Laboratory could take weeks at a time. The key to speeding up the searching process is to quickly locate those interesting events while ignoring millions of others so the important data can be extracted for further analysis.
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