By Patricia McBride, Fermilab, DPF Chair-Elect
(Originally published in January 2010 DPF newsletter)
The 2009 DPF Meeting was held last summer at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan from July 16-31, 2009. The DPF 2009 Meeting (www.dpf2009.wayne.edu/) featured many interesting presentations in the parallel and plenary sessions. There were social events at the Detroit Public Library and the Henry Ford Museum and a public lecture by Lawrence Krauss: “Einsteinʼs Biggest Blunder: A Cosmic Mystery Story.” Pier Oddone, Director of Fermilab, gave the final talk of the plenary sessions which emphasized the importance of accelerators and accelerator R&D in expanding our reach in particle physics research. The DPF 2009 organizing committee was chaired by Alexey Petrov and Paul Karchin from Wayne State University. Proceedings from the meeting will be published electronically through the SLAC Electronic Proceedings repository (eConf C090726). The next DPF Meeting will be held in 2011. The annual APS “April Meeting” 2010 (www.aps.org/meetings/april/index.cfm) will return to Washington, DC this year. The 2010 meeting will be held from February 13-16, 2010 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC.
The annual APS April meeting will be held in conjunction with the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), and we expect a diverse scientific program. The DPF sessions will start on Saturday, February 13 with an invited session on results from first collisions at the LHC.
The Division of Particles and Fields has partnered with other divisions of the APS to put together a broad program for the meeting. There will be joint invited sessions with the Division of Astrophysics (DAP), the Division of Physics of Beams (DPB), the Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) and the Forum for International Physics (FIP). The topics for the invited session include neutrinos, plans for new accelerators, dark matter, new topics in theory and international cooperation in science. There will also be invited sessions devoted to the Panofsky, Bouchet and Wilson Prizes, the Sakurai Prize, the Sakharov Prize and the DPF Thesis Award.
Rob Roser from Fermilab will present “The Search for the Higgs Boson and More at the Tevatron Collider” during one of the large 2010 APS April Meeting plenary sessions. In addition, the DPF will co-sponsor a session on “Beyond the Standard Model: Searches for New Physics” on Saturday, February 13 together with the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP) and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists (NSHP). More than 200 abstracts were submitted to the DPF contributed sessions for the April meeting. It has been a tradition that the contributed talks are twelve minutes including time for questions. In the Fall, the contributed abstracts were assigned to sessions and speakers were notified. The abstracts covered a wide variety of topics including many recent physics results, theory predictions and developments in instrumentation for particle physics.
Each year the DPF hosts a “Business Meeting” for Division members to discuss the issues. This year it will be during the Washington APS meeting – on Monday, February 15 at 5:30 pm. The DPF executive committee and officers will briefly review news items and current issues to the DPF community. This will be a good place to raise your concerns and voice your opinions. We welcome an open dialogue on issues relating to research in Particle Physics. Please come to the meeting and speak up!
