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Director's Corner

Snowmass is rebooting

| 26 November 2021

The Snowmass/P5 process is starting up again in the United States. Now is the time to participate if you are not already involved: attend Snowmass working group meetings, mark  the 2022 Community Summer Study in your calendar, educate yourself, and make your own views known. Snowmass and P5, which stands for Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, are profoundly important. It is essential that the P5 panel make a strong positive statement for U.S. participation in the ILC.  

The Snowmass organisers have invited the international particle physics community to participate in and to provide input to the Snowmass/P5 planning process.  They recognise that the field of particle physics is global and collaborative. The U.S. funding agencies encourage their community to contribute to this important process.

Snowmass/P5 primer

The Snowmass/P5 process is a two-step process used by the particle physics community and its U.S. funding agencies, Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF) to formulate the strategic plan for U.S. particle physics. The planning process for the coming ten to twenty years that started in 2020 was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. After an interlude of many months, work is starting back up where it left off. Working groups are restarting meetings in a virtual mode.  A plenary “Snowmass Day” was  held on 24 September (https://indico.fnal.gov/event/50538/) “to get all the frontiers and participants back together on the same page and refocus our attention to the Snowmass activities”.

Snowmass is the first step in the planning process. It is a community-driven study of the scientific opportunities organised by the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields (DPF), with the participation of the APS Division of Physics and Beams (DPB) and the APS Division of Astrophysics (DAP), as well as the Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) and the Division of Gravitational Physics (DGRAV). Named after a historic series of weeks-long summer studies held in Snowmass, Colorado, starting in 1982, Snowmass now consists of a series of plenary and working group meetings convened over an extended period of a year or more. It culminates in the Community Summer Study embracing the full scientific, technical, and social breadth of the field. The 2022 Snowmass Community Summer Study will be held at the University of Washington from 17 to 22  July  2022. (https://snowmass21.org/)

Andy Lankford

Andy Lankford is Distinguished Professor at University of California, Irvine, and serves as regional representative for the Americas in the ILC International Development Team (IDT).
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