Horizons of scientific inquiry

ICHEP2022 conference in Italy

On 6-13 July, the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP2022) was held in Bologna, Italy, internationally recognised and well-known all over the world as "Rochester Conference". This conference is the 41st in succession since the first conference related to high energy and elementary particle physics was held in 1950 in the small North American city of Rochester. In the USSR, ICHEP conferences were held in Kyiv (twice, 1959 and 1970), Dubna (1964) and Tbilisi (1976). In Russia in Moscow (2006) the 33rd ICHEP conference was successfully held, in which more than 1100 scientists and specialists from all over the world took part.

The organizers of the 41st conference in Bologna were the National Institute for Nuclear Physics of the Italian Republic, INFN (sections in the cities of Bologna and Ferrara), the universities of these cities with the support of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), many scientific and technical centers in America, Europe, Asia and CERN.

The International Advisory Committee of ICHEP2022 that prepared the current areas of the scientific program of the conference, included the heads of the world's leading scientific centers, institutes, laboratories, including JINR Director Academician G.V.Trubnikov.

The conference in Bologna brought together about 1500 participants - theorists and specialists in the field of experimental high energy physics from all continents of the world. This is a record number of participants - physicists of all over the world who showed interest in the scientific event of 2022 in July in Italy, possibly related, among other things, to the 10th anniversary of the official announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN (4 July, 2012). A scientific celebration dedicated to the theme "The Higgs Boson turned 10" was held at CERN on 4 July, almost on the eve of the opening of ICHEP2022 in Bologna. The authors of the idea of spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking, Belgian Francois Englert and Briton Peter Higgs, co-authors of the discovery of the "Higgs particle" at the Large Hadron Collider, including from JINR and Russia, gathered together at CERN (in person and via videoconferences), recalled how research had been prepared and started on the ATLAS and CMS detectors to search for a new fundamental scalar particle that opens the door to understanding the nature of the origin of mass in matter in the Universe, discussed new opportunities for discoveries in the physics of the microworld using accelerators on the ground and in astrophysical research.

The scientific program of the conference in Bologna was extremely rich emphasized by the intensive work of the participants (about 900 reports) over six working days, during which they managed to discuss a wide range of topics in the field of high energy physics and interactions of elementary particles, including: the physics of the Higgs boson, physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particle interactions, neutrino physics, top quark physics and electroweak interactions, quark-lepton flavor physics, strong interaction physics and hadron physics, heavy ion physics, cosmology and astrophysics, challenges and searches for "dark matter", fundamental theoretical physics, physics of advanced accelerators and future projects, development of the CERN LHC complex at high luminosity of particles (HL-LHC), physics and technology of elementary particle detectors and their development, computational physics, education and popularization of high energy physics, development of technologies based on knowledge from the field of high energy physics, cosmology for art and philosophy.

One of the key issues in high energy and elementary particle physics for many years has been the dissatisfaction of some part of the physical community with the universally recognized Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles. This topic was discussed extensively and in detail in Bologna. Why does the well-studied, time-tested and experimentally tested Standard Model no longer satisfy scientists? Without pretending to absolute objectivity and completeness of explanations, the author of these notes will allow himself to list some of the "drawbacks" occurring in the Standard Model, namely:

- lack of explanation of the so-called " hierarchy problem" - a very wide range of masses when describing the interaction between fields (particles);

- lack of self-consistent inclusion in the theory of gravitational interactions;

- the nature of the unification of the three main types of interaction (forces) between fields (particles) is not quite clear yet;

- there is no clear definition of "dark matter" and the inclusion of the latter in the theory, while observing all the basic principles and axioms of quantum field theory;

- there is no explanation of the baryon asymmetry in the Universe yet (why does the occurence of "substance of matter" prevail over "antibody" or "antimatter");

- the neutrino is still massless in theory;

- there is no complete and self-consistent picture with understanding of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.

Moreover, sometimes the issue arises: is the Higgs boson discovered in 2012 exactly the "Standard Model Higgs boson"? Or is the scalar particle with a mass of about 125 GeV discovered at CERN a SM-like Higgs boson? Many of these issues will be resolved in the future. For this purpose, new expensive basic physical facilities are developed in the world, including particle colliders for high interaction energies.

We list some of them:

- HL-LHC (High Luminosity LHC), LHC collider with high luminosity of particles at CERN;

- HE-LHC (High Energy LHC), LHC collider with a higher collision energy up to 27 TeV between protons at CERN;

- ILC (International Linear Collider), a linear collider of electrons and positrons with a collision energy from 250 GeV to 1000 GeV between the latter in Japan (possibly);

- CLIC (Compact Linear Collider), a compact linear collider of electrons and positrons with a collision energy from 380 GeV to 3000 GeV between the latter at CERN;

- FCC-ee (Future Circular Collider ee), a promising circular collider of electrons and positrons with a collision energy up to 350 GeV between the latter at CERN;

- CEPC (China Electron Positron Collider), an electron-positron collider with a collision energy up to 250 GeV in China,

- FCC-hh (Future Circular Collider hh), a promising circular hadron collider with a collision energy of 100 TeV between proton beams at CERN.

There are two years of hard work ahead of the next "Rochester Conference". The next, 42nd ICHEP2024 conference will be held in Prague in July, 2024.

Gennady KOZLOV