This award provides partial support for the String Phenomenology 2011 conference to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA on August 22-26, 2011. The funds will be used to subsidize the costs for young researchers in the field and to mitigate the cost of conference planning and facilities. String Phenomenology 2011 is the tenth annual meeting of the highly successful String Phenomenology conference series, which was launched in 2002 at Oxford University. The String Phenomenology annual conferences have become the hallmark venue for the presentation and dissemination of research progress and results in the growing field of string phenomenology, which focuses on the fundamental question of how to connect observable particle physics and cosmology with the domain of fundamental theory. Young researchers are particularly encouraged to attend the conference to present their work and interact with established leaders in the field. In selecting the invited speakers and advertising the opportunity to present talks in the parallel sessions to the community, it is a high priority to recruit qualified women and underrepresented minorities. Topics covered include advances in string compactifications and the resulting effective theories, moduli stabilization and supersymmetry breaking, formal theory and mathematical techniques, string cosmology, and connections to present and forthcoming experimental results in particle physics and cosmology.
String phenomenology is a dynamic and ever-growing field that is of particular interest in this data-dominated era characterized by Large Hadron Collider at CERN and a wealth of cosmological data. The scientific program includes plenary talks by leading researchers in the field. The String Phenomenology conferences are diverse, international meetings that emphasize the connections between formal theory and observations, and as such have impact on the intellectual progress in both areas. The emphasis on including young researchers allows for a broad audience and promotes young researchers in the field. This conference series provides the only large-scale annual meetings dedicated to this subfield of theoretical high energy physics, and thus they are of great importance to the advancement of the field.The conference website will be developed and advertised to disseminate the material presented at the meeting, including all plenary talk slides.
The Tenth Annual International String Phenomenology Conference was held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison on August 22-26, 2011. The Conference was organized by Profs. Gary Shiu and Lisa Everett, with the help of two postdoctoral fellows Heng-Yu Chen and Jiajun Xu. The scientific subjects of the talks and discussions were chosen to be widely interdisciplinary, reflecting the scope and maturity of the field. The conference brought together researchers of diverse subfields in physics and mathematics to present and discuss recent developments in connecting observable particle physics and cosmology with the domain of fundamental theory. The 5-day meeting was full packed with activities with 44 scheduled plenary talks, 31 parallel talks, and ample time for informal discussions. Of the plenary talks, 15 were given by postdocs and students, while all the parallel talks were given by students and postdocs. These talks cover a wide spectrum of topics of great relevance to string phenomenology, ranging from constructions of realistic particle physics models from string theory and studies of their low energy effective theory, string cosmology, and the implications of string theory to inflation, dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry phenomenology, and LHC physics. Furthermore, there is a specific plenary session dedicated to showcasing the SVP (String Vacuum Project) fellows. SVP is an NSF funded multi-institution, interdisciplinary network dedicated to exploring the space of string models (string vacua) and their low-energy phenomenological implications. Four students who were funded as SVP fellows -- Jim Havelson, Ran Lu, Paul McGuirk, and Daniel Park -- were given an opportunity to present their work. The meeting was attended by about a hundred registered participants, as well as a large number of postdocs and students from Wisconsin and neighboring institutions, such as University of Chicago, who were welcome to sit in on the lectures. Of the registered attendees, many were new participants (mainly students and postdocs in related fields), both from and outside the SVP nodes. Of the participants, 5 were women, all of them presented talks. Another characteristic of this conference is the strong participation of student and postdocs. Junior participants were given ample time to present their work, and were treated equally as their senior counterparts. Many of them have given their first conference talk at this meeting. The feedback received about the meeting overall was very positive -- particularly its interdisciplinary and educational emphasis. The intellectual merit of this conference is that it provides a unique venue for research activities in string phenomenology, which are aimed at connecting string theory with observable particle physics and cosmology. String phenomenology is a dynamic and ever-growing field that is of particular interest in this data-dominated era characterized by Large Hadron Collider at CERN and a wealth of cosmological data. The scientific program includes plenary talks by leading researchers in the field. The String Phenomenology conferences are diverse, international meetings that emphasize the connections between formal theory and observations, and as such have impact on the intellectual progress in both areas. The broader impacts of this conference are substantive. The emphasis on including young researchers allows for a broad audience and promotes young researchers in the field. The impact of the String Phenomenology conferences has been highly significant in the field, and the conferences have become increasingly popular each year. This conference series provides the only large-scale annual meetings dedicated to this subfield of theoretical high energy physics, and thus they are of great importance to the advancement of the field. A conference website was developed and advertised to disseminate the material presented at the meeting: http://conferencing.uwex.edu/conferences/stringpheno2011/index.cfm The conference was featured in the Wisconsin State Journal on August 25, 2011 in an article entitled `` In the world of physics, strings no small thing": http://host.madison.com/news/local/education/university/in-the-world-of-physics-strings-no-small-thing/article_1c7d45de-f2ce-5f82-bf07-e9c2df249dae.html which drew the interest of the local general public. Moreover, results presented in this conference were discussed widely in several popular science blogs. Through our conference and its news coverage, the general public has a better understanding of the goals and results of string phenomenology.
