Future Prospects for Fundamental Particle Physics and Cosmology Workshop: May 4 – 8, 2015

Organized by Lars Brink, Viatcheslav Mukhanov, and Nikita Nekrasov
Dates: May 4 – 8, 2015

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Fundamental Particle Physics and Cosmology are both at fascinating crossroads. With the start of the LHC at CERN, the world’s most advanced particle accelerator it has finally been possible to probe particle physics at far higher energies than before. Even though it has run so far on only half of the maximal energy, the discovery of the Higgs particle (Nobel Prize 2013) has robustly confirmed the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, which is a key ingredient of the Standard Model of particle physics. The most important future tasks will be to search for the other new particles, which could be candidates for dark matter particles, that have so far only been seen via their gravitational interactions or completely unexpected new particles that could teach us more about he physics beyond the Standard Model.

The era of the precision cosmology begun with the COBE experiment, which reported in 1992, for the first time, the detection of the fluctuations of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation (Nobel Prize 2006). The series of experiments, which followed COBE delivered precise information about the state of the Universe at early times, when it was only about a few hundred thousand years old. One of the really outstanding problems of the modern particle physics and cosmology is to explain the origin of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The recent Plank mission measurements have delivered to us detailed information about the spectrum of the primordial fluctuations, which have lead to the formation of the structures in the Universe. It is thus clear that, under these conditions, the Planck results combined with possible discoveries of LHC will most likely modify in important ways particle physics and the theory of the very early universe.

This workshop will assemble leaders in the fields of theoretical particle physics and cosmology with the aim to develop a unified view of the future most promising prospects in fundamental physics in the area of particle physics and cosmology.