Celebrating Discovery of the Higgs Boson & Recent Advances in Particle Physics

                    Washington, DC  - November 20, 2013

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         Celebrating US Particle Physics

LHC event

Washington, DC
November 20, 2013

The US particle physics community, under the sponsorship of the DPF, will host a reception in Washington, D.C., to apprise Congress of the leading role of the US particle physics community, particularly in the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC. The reception with refreshments from 5:30 to 7:00 pm, will include a 10 minute outreach-style talk on the Higgs by CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela.

We have made remarkable advances in recent years. The discovery of the Higgs boson announced on July 4, 2012 was celebrated around the world, and elevated the public's interest in our research. On October 8, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider." Other very significant recent advances have included the discovery of a large value for the neutrino mixing angle theta_13, as well as the awarding of the 2011 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe.

The remarkable discovery of the Higgs boson was made possible by global scientific collaborations including more than 1500 U.S. scientists from national laboratories and over eighty universities, who provided key ideas, talent, technology, and leadership, building on twenty five years of experience at the Fermilab Tevatron. At the event we will commemorate the Higgs discovery and the US role, to increase Congressional awareness of our success and our opportunities for outstanding new discoveries in the coming years. We will describe our intense planning study (Snowmass) that has engaged our community this past year, and the expectations that the P5 process will outline excellent priorities for our field.

Figure above comes from the artwork of Xavier Cortada. To see the complete set of "In search of the Higgs boson" images, click here.