This award will provide participant support for young investigators (graduate students and postdocs) to attend the workshop "Vistas in Axion Physics: A Roadmap for Theoretical and Experimental Axion Physics through 2025" to be held at the University of Washington's Institute for Nuclear Theory, Seattle, on April 23-26, 2012. The goal of this workshop is (1) to organize the scientific foundation for the next generation of axion and axion-like-particle (ALP) experiments and searches, and (2) to be a roadmap for the researchers, research sponsors and the broader scientific community.
For Broader Impacts, it has a particular focus on early career scientists (postdocs and graduate students) and the Proceedings of the Workshop will be published.
The context of the workshop was as follows. There has been a dramatic world-wide increase in theoretical and experimental interest in axions, axion-like particles and light bosons in recent years. Consequently, the axion community organized this workshop to (1) review the current state of these particle searches and prospects for next-generation efforts, and (2) to produce a roadmap for the R&D and major experiments that a comprehensive strategy would include. This workshop brought together researchers and agency representatives for in-depth reviews of the science, assessment of readiness for critical underpinning technologies, and development of point-designs for future experiments. 1. Sources of funding. The workshop funding came from three sources: Institute for Nuclear theory, DOE-HEP workshop support and NSF workshop support (program officer Dr. Jim Whitmore) PHY-1222629. The NSF award wholly paid for participant support, emphasizing young participants (students and postdocs). A photo of the participants is appended to this report. 2. Did the workshop achieve its goals, was it a success? The workshop was a success, based on the following. a. There was a tremendous interest in the workshop, more than we had anticipated. Due to space and funding limitations, we had to turn away quite a few applicants. Some people just showed up, including luminaries like Bjorken. b. Due possibly to keynote speakers Frank Wilczek and Michael Turner, there was as well a high level of local excitement. Turner gave a very well-attended colloquium on the origins and challenges in cosmology. Throughout the workshop, the workshop meeting room was mostly full; at times it was standing-room-only. c. The workshop working groups did their job well. They prepared material in advance. They organized their topics and did a good job of presenting overviews early in the workshop and summaries later. Several new ideas were birthed at the workshop. d. The enthusiasm and activity of the working groups continues. The work of the Roadmap workshop is feeding into the axion and axion-like-particle component of the "Snowmass Process" of strategizing HEP and cosmology into the next decade. It is very likely this INT Axion Roadmap workshop will therefore have a large influence in axion science. 3. Workshop document: what stage is it and in what outlet will it appear? What is effectively heavily-edited proceedings of the Workshop will appear as a Review of Modern Physics article. This will be a refereed article, and we have already received an invitation and confirmation to write the article from RMP. We are now in the process of collecting working-group summaries and assembling them into a rough document. We anticipate the editing, review and publication process will take about 18 months. We have a secondary target of having a near-complete draft of the review ready by the summer 2013 Snowmass meeting. This meeting and document are important inputs to the "cosmic frontier" Snowmass process.
