APS Particles & Fields Meeting Draws Physicists to Pittsburgh

Carnegie Mellon University’s Curtis Meyer has high energy when it comes to physics. His enthusiasm for the field showed when he welcomed participants to the APS Division of Particles & Fields (DPF) Meeting co-hosted by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh May 13-17.

“It is great to have some 600 physicists in Pittsburgh,” said Meyer, who is the Mellon College of Science interim dean. “Along with a strong group in theoretical high-energy physics at Carnegie Mellon, we enjoy the close proximity to our neighbors at the University of Pittsburgh, in particular the physicists at the Pittsburgh Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology Center. There has been a long history of joint activities between the two universities.”

The APS DPF meeting was combined with Pitt’s annual Phenomenology Symposium (Pheno) and covered topics in particle physics theory and experiment as well as related issues, e.g., in astrophysics and cosmology. Physicists were in attendance from 15 countries and 42 states.

Carnegie Mellon Assistant Physics Professor Valentina Dutta was a speaker at the event and part of the local organizing committee. She discussed work done by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment and the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. From September 2021 to September 2023, she co-led the group of physicists at the CMS experiment who work on searches for Supersymmetry. The vast amounts of data being generated by both CMS and the ATLAS experiment at CERN is providing unprecedented opportunities to explore new physics.

“While we haven’t yet seen any clear indication of new physics, that is, physics beyond what is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, in the LHC data, there are some interesting anomalies seen by the two experiments that are worth keeping an eye on,” Dutta said. “Whether they are simply fluctuations in the data, or the hints of physics beyond the Standard Model showing up, will be revealed by analyzing more data.”

The local organizing committee also included Carnegie Mellon physics faculty members Assistant Professor John Alison, Assistant Professor Matteo Cremonesi, Associate Professor Diana Parno and Professor and MCS Associate Dean for Research Manfred Paulini.

Carnegie Mellon and Pitt last previously jointly co-sponsored the 2017 APS Division of Nuclear Physics Meeting. While most activities at the recent meeting took place at the University of Pittsburgh, a public lecture was hosted at Carnegie Mellon on Tuesday evening.

Hitoshi Murayama, a well-known theoretical particle physicist, who has received numerous awards and served on many advisory committees, gave the public lecture in CMU's McConomy auditorium. Most recently he chaired the 2023 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) that was charged with developing a 10-year strategic plan for U.S. particle physics. In the lecture “How did we come to be? That’s a physics question!” he addressed the 10-year plan and related research in areas such as dark matter, the Higgs boson and neutrinos.

"It was a great team effort from our high-energy group to host the DPF-Pheno conference in Pittsburgh and, in particular, attracting renowned physicist Hitoshi Murayama to give a public lecture,” Paulini said. “The lecture was very well attended by many community members interested in the future of particle physics research."

Carnegie Mellon has a strong tradition of particle physics going back to the 1940s when the school — which was then known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology — began to construct a synchrotron. At the time it was built, it was one of the two highest-energy accelerators in operation.

For the past 80 years Carnegie Mellon has received federal funding support for high-energy physics research. Current efforts are on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Belle 2 at KEK in Japan, the Katrin and COHERENT neutrino experiments at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, respectively, and the future Light Dark Matter Experiment (LDMX).