Physics:Snowmass DPF meetings

Snowmass (or DPF) meetings are long-term planning exercises organized by the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society (APS). The goals of the meetings are to review the current state of Particle Physics (or high-energy physics, HEP), investigate the future of the field, possible technologies for high-energy accelerators, particle detector concepts and new particle-detection technologies. The first Snowmass HEP meeting was organized at Colorado. Some 150 participants gathered from June 28 to July 16, 1982 in the isolated setting of Snowmass, Colorado, a mountain resort above 2500 meters altitude.

Since then the high-energy physics community in the United States has gathered at several intervals to explore the future of high-energy particle physics. Over the past thirty years the meetings were usually organized at Snowmass in summers. Such Snowmass study reports were a key resource for setting priorities in particle physics in the USA.

2005 Snowmass DPF meetings

In August nearly 700 scientists and engineers from North America, Asia and Europe got together at Snowmass in the US to advance the design of the International Linear Collider and its detectors, and to refine the HEP case for this next-generation machine . Proceedings of the Snowmass Workshop appeared on the SLAC Electronic Conference Proceedings Archive .

2013 Snowmass DPF meetings

Starting from 2013 the summer DPF meetings were organized in several different locations. The meetings were called Community Summer Study (the "Snowmass study"), or DPF-planning exercises, without explicit reference to a place of the meetings. The most recent DPF-planning exercise was conducted in 2013, bringing together nearly 700 physicists from the US, and many participants from Europe and Asia. A similar number of participants were involved in the previous Snowmass HEP meetings in 2005.

During 2013 DPF meeting the particle physics studies were divided into "Intensity Frontier" (explore fundamental questions by using precision measurements to search for extremely rare processes), "Energy Frontier" (using high-energy colliders to directly produce heavy elementary particle) and "Cosmic Frontier" (observational studies of the universe to search for new fundamental particles and interactions). About 30 small workshops were held in 2013 to prepare for the “Snowmass on the Mississippi” session at the University of Minnesota, which was attended by several hundred physicists in July-August 2013 in order to identify the future research directions for the United States particle physics program. The meetings covered theoretical and experimental particle physics, instrumentation, outreach, computing and education. The results of the meeting were passed to the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) which outlined the strategic plan for U.S. particle physics in their report "Building for Discovery. Strategic Plan for U.S. Particle Physics in the Global Context" (May 2014) .

2019-2022 Snowmass DPF meetings

The Snowmass 21 community planning exercise, that has been delayed since January 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the full activity restarted from September 2021 . The goal of the meeting is to provide an opportunity for the entire particle physics community to come together to identify and document a scientific vision for the future of particle physics in the U.S. and its international partners. Snowmass will define the most important questions for the field of particle physics and identify promising opportunities to address them .