HEPAP Subpanel Report on Planning for the Future of U.S. High-Energy Physics

摘要

High-energy physicists seek to understand the universe by investigating the most basic particles and the forces between them. Experiments and theoretical insights over the past several decades have made it possible to see the deep connections between apparently unrelated phenomena and to piece together more of the story of how a rich and complex cosmos could evolve from just a few kinds of elementary particles. Our nation's contributions to this remarkable achievement have been made possible by the federal government's support of basic research and the development of the state-of-the-art accelerators and detectors needed to investigate the physics of the elementary particles. This investment has been enormously successful: of the fifteen Nobel Prizes awarded for research in experimental and theoretical particle physics over the past forty years, physicists in the U.S. program won or shared in thirteen and account for twenty-four of the twenty-nine recipients. New high- energy physics facilities now under construction will allow us to take the next big steps toward understanding the origin of mass and the asymmetry between the behavior of matter and antimatter. The U.S. Department of Energy has asked its High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) to recommend a scenario for an optimal and balanced U.S. high-energy physics program over the next decade. In response to this charge, a Subpanel was appointed in March 1997. The present report is the plan developed by the Subpanel for the nation's high-energy physics program. It balances near-term scientific opportunities with preparations for the most important discovery possibilities in the long term. In the field of high-energy physics, the financial and intellectual scale of future large facilities means that international collaboration in their design and construction is increasingly necessary.