This award provides funding for the PHENO 2010, PHENO 2011, and PHENO 2012 conferences to be held each May at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. These annual PHENO conferences will be devoted, in large part, to studying the physics that might emerge from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, and the connections between these experimental results and results from other collider- and non-collider-based experiments in both elementary particle physics and astrophysics and cosmology. After nearly twenty years of plannning and construction, the LHC is now the highest-energy collider in the world, and results from this machine are expected to provide important insight into some of the most pressing questions that confront particle physics at the TeV scale.
NSF support for this conference is also vital in order to enable young physicists to attend the Pheno Symposia. Indeed, the PHENO Conferences are nothing less than the largest professional student meetings in high-energy physics in the United States. Most of the student participants also present their research work in the parallel sessions, providing them with valuable opportunities to meet their peers, gain valuable research feedback, and develop contacts with senior physicists. To encourage young participants to attend, the tradition of the PHENO conferences is that graduate students can attend the PHENO Conferences free of charge, and postdocs have a reduced conference fee compared to more senior participants. As a result, many physicists gave their first conference talk at a PHENO Conference.
The annual Phenomenology (Pheno) Symposia started at the University of Wisconsin (UW) - Madison’s Institute for Elementary Particle Physics Research in the late 1980's. Historically, approximately 120 participants (in 1999) was the desirable size for this conference. However, the Pheno Symposia have drawn increasingly large audiences in the last decade, reaching 260 participants in 2009. In 2011, the Pheno symposium moved to the University of Pittsburgh, sponsored by the Pittsburgh Particle physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology Center (PITT PACC) where it continued to grow in importance and size, reaching 310 participants in 2012. The Pheno Symposia last for two and one-half days, with three morning plenary sessions to cover a broad range of theoretical and experimental topics, as well as two afternoon parallel sessions to encourage short presentations from junior researchers. The topics covered are the most current and relevant issues in particle physics phenomenology, from low-energy phenomena to collider physics, as well as issues in astro-particle physics and cosmology, and new theoretical developments. Many prominent theoretical and experimental physicists attend and present talks at the Pheno Symposia, with the experimental collaborations regularly sending representatives to present the results of their experiments. The Pheno symposium series have had a deep and broad impact on the field. One of the trademark features of the Pheno symposia is the large involvement of junior researchers, including graduate students and early career postdocs. In fact, there were 123 students at Pheno 2012 (40% of the participants) and 132 students at Pheno 2013 (46% of the participants) making this the largest professional student meeting in high energy physics in the US. (By comparison, the well-known TASI summer school includes approximately 60 students each year.) Many students in HEP give their first-ever scientific presentation in a Pheno symposium. The number of postdocs is also significant with 105 (34%) in 2012 and 85 (30%) in 2013. The strong presence from students and postdocs has long been encouraged at the Pheno symposia by reducing the registration fee for postdocs and completely waiving the registration fee for students. These junior researchers rely heavily on this reduction to attend Pheno. Additionally, for the first time ever, for Pheno 2013, we further supported student involvement by awarding travel fellowships (funded by PITT PACC) for students to attend Pheno. The winners of this travel fellowship were chosen from a pool of applicants and based on both the importance of their research and their financial need. Fifteen fellowships were awarded at Pheno 2013. Several of these award winners indicated that they would not have been able to attend Pheno without this scholarship. The Pheno Symposia provide an important venue for young physicists to present talks and interact with senior, highly respected theorists and experimentalists. In order to encourage this, priority for the parallel session talks is given to students and postdocs. As an example, in 2013, 43% of the parallel talks were presented by students while 36% were given by postdocs. As a matter of fact, many students give their first-ever conference talk at our Pheno symposium. Moreover, a small continental breakfast, numerous coffee breaks, and a symposium banquet provide many opportunities for informal discussions between junior and senior researchers.
