The Future of Our Physics Including New Frontiers

The following sections are included:

• PREFACE
• CONTENTS

The following sections are included:

• Physics Problems
• The Whole of our Knowledge
• The Future
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Dirac – Antiparticles & Antimatter
  • Appendix B: Blackett – The discovery of the “Vacuum Polarization” (1932) [the 1^st example of radiative effect: pre-the Lamb-shift (1947)]
  • Appendix C: The New Manhattan Project
• References

This review is based on lectures given by M. J. Duff summarising the far reaching contributions of Ettore Majorana to fundamental physics, with special focus on Majorana fermions in all their guises. The theoretical discovery of the eponymous fcrmion in 1937 has since had profound implications for particlc physics, solid state and quantum computation. The breadth of these disciplines is testimony to Majorana’s genius, which continues to permeate physics today. These lectures offer a whistle-stop tour through some limited subset of the key ideas. In addition to touching on these various applications, we will draw out some fascinating relations connecting the normed division algebras ℝ, ℂ, H, O to spinors, trialities. K-theory and the classification of stable topological states of symmetry-protected gapped free-fermion systems.

This review is devoted to highlight some aspects of the relevance of Majorana fermions in rigid supersymmetry breaking in four spacetime dimensions. After introducing some basic facts on spinors, and on their symmetries and reality properties, we consider Goldstino actions describing partial breaking of rigid supersymmetry, then focussing on Born-Infeld non-linear theory, its duality symmetry, and its supersymmetric extensions, also including multi-field generalizations exhibiting doubly self-duality.

In these lectures we review how the symmetrics of gravitational theories may be regarded as originating from those of “Yang-Mills squared”. We begin by motivating the idea that certain aspects of gravitational theories can be captured by the product, in some sense, of two distinct Yang-Mills theories, particularly in the context of scattering amplitudes. We then introduce a concrete dictionary for the covariant fields of (super)gravity in terms of the product of two (super) Yang-Mills theories. The dietionary implies that the symmetries of each (super) Yang-Mills factor generate the symmetries of the corresponding (super)gravity theory: general covariance, p-form gauge invariance, local Lorentz invariance, local supersymmetry, R-symmetry and U-duality.

Classicalization is a phenomenon by which a theory shields itself from the strong coupling regime by redistributing a high energy of few initial hard quanta among many weakly-interacting soft quanta. In this way, the high-energy scattering process splits into large number of soft elementary processes, each with very low momentum exchange. The outcome of such a scattering experiment is a production of states of large occupation number that are approximately classical. It is evident that black hole creation in particle collision at super-Planckian energies is a result of classicalization, but there is no a priory reason why this phenomenon must be limited to gravity. If the hierarchy problem is solved by classica1ization, the LHC has a chance of detecting the tower of resonances. The heavier resonances are expected to be longer-lived and to decay into larger number of the softer quanta.

We discuss mass matrices with four texture zeros for the quarks and leptons. The three mixing angles for the quarks and leptons are functions of the fermion masses. The results agree with the experimental data. The ratio of the masses of the first two neutrinos is given by the solar mixing angle. The neutrino masses are calculated: m₁ ≈ 0.004 eV, m₂ ≈ 0.010 eV, m₃ ≈ 0.070 eV…

The journey for the search of the Standard Model Higgs boson at the LHC started more than two decades ago. During 2010-2012, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have started exploring physics at the high-energy frontier. Thanks to the superb turn-on of the LHC already a rich harvest of initial physics results has been obtained by the general-purpose experiments ATLAS and CMS. The initial data have allowed one to test, at the highest collision energies ever reached in a laboratory, the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles, and to make many searches Beyond the Standard Model (BSM). Clearly the most important results have been obtained with the discovery of a (or ‘the’) Higgs boson, which establishes the postulated electro-weak symmetry breaking mechanism in the SM.

By transforming a cubic kilometer of natural Antarctic ice into a neutrino detector, the IceCube project created the opportunity to observe cosmic neutrinos. We describe the experiment and the complementary methods presently used to study the flux of the recently discovered cosmic neutrinos. In one method, events are selected in which neutrinos interacted inside the instrumented volume of the detector, yielding a sample of events dominated by neutrinos of electron and tau flavor. Alternatively, another method detects secondary muons produced by neutrinos selected for having traveled through the Earth to reach the detector, providing a pure sample of muon neutrinos. We will summarize the results obtained with the enlarged data set collected since the initial discovery and appraise the current status of high-energy neutrino astronomy. Continued observations are closing in on the source candidates. In this context, we highlight the potential of multimessenger analyses as well as the compelling case for constructing a next-generation detector larger by one order of magnitude in volume.

It seems to be deceptively easy to turn Einstein’s gravity theory into a renormalizable theory by following a procedure that would have successfully turned Fermi’s non renormalizable theory of the weak interactions into a renormalizable gauge theory as in the Standard Model. In gravity, the resulting theory is a conformal system, which features a negative metric massive spin 2 particle. Apart from this apparent disease, this theory has many desirable features. Black holes, for instance, turn from exotic oddities into regular topological solitons.

Models of inflation are instructive playgrounds for supersymmetry breaking in Supergravity and String Theory. In particular, combinations of branes and orientifolds that are not mutually BPS can lead to brane supersymmetry breaking, a phenomenon where non-linear realizations are accompanied, in tachyon-free vacua, by the emergence of steep exponential potentials. When combined with milder terms, these exponentials can lead to slow-roll after a fast ascent and a turning point. This leaves behind distinctive patterns of scalar perturbations, where pre-inflationary peaks lie well apart from an almost scale invariant profile. I review recent attempts to connect these power spectra to the low-ℓ CMB, and a corresponding one-parameter extension of ΛCDM with a low-frequency cut Δ. A detailed likelihood analysis led to Δ = (0.351 ± 0.114) × 10⁻³ Mpc⁻¹, at 99.4% confidence level, in an extended Galactic mask with f_sky = 39%, to be compared with a nearby value at 88.5% in the standard f_sky = 94% mask. In these scenarios one would be confronted, in the C:VIB, with relics of an epoch of deceleration that preceded the onset of slow-roll.

LAA was the first special program at CERN dedicated to prepare the future beyond the ongoing CERN Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) construction program 1980 to 1989. Unlike all previous CERN projects (PS, BOOSTER, BEBC, ISR, SPS)LEP approval was obtained under the condition to stay within the CERN budget level. No extra project budget was assigned for this major European scientific infrastructure project! This required to set priorities: CERN facilities and many experiments had to be closed to free resources for LEP construction and for the ongoing proton-antiproton SPS collider experiments -one of the few European science programs leading to a Nobel Prize…

The history of neutrino physics is an instructive example of how the physics knowledge advances in an interplay between theoretical developments and progress of the experimental art. Neutrinos, in particular, have always surprised us, behaving differently from the expectations.

In the first part of the lecture I shall summarise the principal steps of neutrino history.

I then shall give a flash on the status of our knowledge and an outlook on the perspectives for the next years.

The following sections are included:

• A very interesting period in HEP
• INFN today
• Conclusions
• References

The LHC has delivered for the first time collisions of Nuclei in November 2010, at an energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair, which represents a jump of more than an order of magnitude over the highest energy nuclear collisions ever studied before. The high energy, the quality of the state-of-the art detectors, and the readiness of the experimental collaborations at the LHC have allowed a rich harvest of important scientific results. In fact, many of the most cited papers published about LHC results from the various experimental collaboration deal with nuclear collisions. The overall interest in the program has grown constantly form those first collisions, and now all 4 major LHC experiments include the study of Nuclear Collisions in their scientific program. In this lecture a short overview will be given of how the results from the LHC, and in particular from the ALICE experiment, have provided new insight on the properties of matter under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, analogous to the conditions present in the early phases of the evolution of the Universe. Results from both the nucleus-nucleus and the proton-nucleus runs will be presented. Finally, a very short outlook to the future of nuclear Collisions at the LHC will be given.

The High Luminosity LHC is one of the major scientific project of the next decade. It aims at increasing the luminosity reach of LHC by a factor five for peak luminosity and a factor ten in integrated luminosity. The project, now fully approved and funded, will be finished in ten years and will prolong the life of LHC until 2035-2040. It implies deep modifications of the LHC for about 1.2 km around the high luminosity insertions of ATLAS and CMS and relies on new cutting edge technologies. We are developing new advanced superconducting magnets capable of reaching 12 T field; superconducting RF crab cavities capable to rotate the beams with great accuracy; 100 kA and hundred meter long superconducting links for removing the power converter out of the tunnel; new collimator concepts, etc… Beside the important physics goals, the High Luminosity LHC project is an ideal test bed for new technologies for the next hadron collider for the post-LHC era.

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• News from BNL since ISSP2014
• RHIC Operations in 2015 and accelerator future plans
• 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Perfect Liquid
• RHIC Beam Energy Scan (BES) in search of a critical point—aided by Lattice QCD
• References

The importance of flavour physics as a method to search for non-Standard Model effects is explained. The LHCb experiment is introduced, and selected recent highlights are presented. Prospects are given for the new LHC run and for the Upgrade phase of the experiment.

The following sections are included:

• DISCUSSION I
• DISCUSSION II

The following sections are included:

• DISCUSSION I
• DISCUSSION II

The following section is included:

• DISCUSSION

Let us start the Celebration of our New Talents by calling your attention on what has been done - one week before our School activity started its 53^rd Course devoted to “the Future of our Physics, including new Frontiers” -in Bologna…

The following sections are included:

• DIPLOMAS
• PARTICIPANTS