This award will provide partial support for junior physicists to participate in the 2011 Linear Collider Workshop of the Americas which will be held on the University of Oregon - Eugene campus March 19 - 23, 2011. This meeting is the joint meeting of the Global Design Effort (GDE) and the physics and detector community, led by the American Linear Collider Physics Group (ALCPG). The event will include plenary and parallel sessions covering topics of importance to accelerator and detector development as well as physics results from the LHC. Attendance by junior members of the community is a priority for this meeting. Requests for financial support will be solicited from young scientists throughout the United States. A committee of senior scientists will review and select the most promising young candidates, paying close attention to diversity and providing opportunities for under-represented groups.
SUPPORT FOR PARTICIPATION IN THE 2011 LINEAR COLLIDER WORKSHOP OF THE AMERICAS The next high energy physics collider project envisioned by the global community is the linear collider, which has the potential to follow up on discoveries made at the LHC or elsewhere with excellent precision. This precision is necessary to fully understand the role of any new physics discoveries in the theoretical framework of particle physics. The possible physics topics include the origin of mass and electroweak symmetry breaking (such as the Higgs boson or bosons), new particle states related to dark matter (such as Neutralinos), or other new particle discoveries from a variety of fundamental origins. The Linear Collider Workshop of the Americas was held on the campus of the University of Oregon, March 19-23, 2011 to take stock of recent progress in the planning of the linear collider. This NSF grant provided travel support for a selected group of twelve young scientists, to enable them to participate in the workshop. This joint meeting of the Global Design Effort (GDE) and the physics and detector community, led by the American Linear Collider Physics Group (ALCPG), provided an excellent opportunity for young scientist to engage with more senior members of the field in technical activities. At the time of the workshop, the revised baseline design for the GDE technical design was nearing completion, allowing focused work on the details of the technical design for the machine. The two detector groups (ILD and SiD) brought recent progress on the detector designs, and the status of the machine-detector interface effort. They are working toward the Detailed Baseline Designs, scheduled in 2012. Many detector R&D groups also reported significant recent progress. Recent work on physics topics were presented and discussed, along with results from the LHC. This important meeting, attended by about 200 members of the international community, followed the sequence of recent meetings on this work in Albuquerque (Sep 2009), Beijing (March 2010), and Geneva (Oct 2010). Following a review of applications from young scientists by a committee of senior scientists, the most promising young candidates were selected for support. Thirteen applications were selected. One awardee declined, resulting in twelve awards. These young scientists engaged fully in the workshop, including as speakers for the following presentations: Riccardo Abbate, MIT, "Precision Extraction of alpha_s in SCET," Top, QCD, Loopverien Session; Burak Bilki, U. Iowa, "Positron and pion responses in the DHCAL," Calorimetry Session; Christoph Englert, Heidelberg University, "WZ+jet, Wgamma+jet with anomalous couplings," Top, QCD, Loopverien Session; Garabed Halladjian, U. Iowa, "Neutrinos from outer space!" Physics Slam (public event); Pearl Sandick, U. Texas Austin, "New Physics and Dark Matter," ALCPG Plenary Session; Jacob Smith, U. of Texas at Arlington, "Construction and testing of the DHCAL," Calorimetry Session; Brock Tweedie, Boston University, "Top Tagging," Top, QCD, Loopverien Session; Michael Woods, UC Davis, "Developments in Si-W Calorimeter Interconnections and Sensor Assembly," Calorimetry Session; Remi Zaidan, U. Iowa, "Status of UIPFA," Simulation and Reconstruction Session. A public event, "The Particle Physics Slam" was held during the workshop. One of the supported young scientists participated as a contestant in this very popular event. About eight hundred of the local community came out to hear seven physicists each describe an aspect of modern particle physics. The individual presentations were followed by a lively question and answer forum that lasted for about one hour.
