PASI2006 - Beyond the Standard Model in Cosmology, Astroparticle and Particle Physics

This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute will be held in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, from October 23 through November 8, 2006, in conjunction with the Sixth Latin American Symposium on High Energy Physics and the XII Mexican School of Particles and Fields (VI-SILAFAE/XII-MSPF).

The PASI2006 lecture program will be presented during the first eight working days, October 23 through October 31. An outstanding group of lecturers has been selected both for their expertise in the various fields and their effectiveness in presentation. They have been asked to give their lectures at the Postdoctoral level with the understanding that some in the audience will be advanced graduate students and that the student body will include both theorists and experimentalists. We therefore invite applications from both Post Docs and advanced graduate students performing research in Cosmology, Astroparticle or Particle Physics in countries throughout the Americas. We have requested financial support for students and lecturers through the PASI program funded jointly by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Students will be selected on the basis of two letters of recommendation, one of them to come from the current Postdoctoral or graduate advisor.

Research seminars, the majority on the results of current experiments, will be presented in plenary sessions to both PASI2006 and VI-SILAFAE/XII-MSPF participants during the second eight working days, November 1 through November 8. These will complement the material presented in the lecture courses, which is expected to be primarily theoretical. All lectures and seminars will be given in English. The first two days of the joint sessions will be a special program to celebrate 50 years of the neutrino. We are fortunate that two Nobel Laureates, Leon Lederman and James Cronin, as well as the new director of Fermilab, Pier Oddone, will speak during this special event. The two-day program will also include a number of research seminars detailing the latest results from what is now known as the "neutrino revolution". During the past seven or eight years neutrinos have been found to have non-zero masses, which means that leptons mix. While neutrino oscillations have been the subject of a considerable amount of speculation since the apparent deficit of solar electron neutrinos observed some 40 years ago, confirmation of this phenomenon has been made only relatively recently.

This is only one of the indications that the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics is not complete despite its great success in explaining the results of experiments to date. The ordinary matter the SM describes is now known through precise cosmological observations to comprise only ~5% of the mass-energy density of the universe. Theoretical extensions to the SM proposed to answer the many open questions that remain in particle physics also show promise of revealing the identity of the "dark matter" measured to be five times as prevalent as ordinary matter in the universe. Verification of these theoretical ideas awaits the results of experiments that will soon take place at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the International Linear Collider still in the planning stages. Some very exciting discoveries are expected as accelerator energies reach those heretofore seen only in the early universe.

This is an opportunity for young U.S. physicists to participate along with their peers from countries throughout the hemisphere in the premier event in the field of high energy physics organized by Latin Americans in Latin America. The event will help them to make contacts it is hoped will stay with them throughout their careers. Another motivation is to showcase the very fine work going on in these fields throughout the Americas. The overarching goal of this activity is to promote future research collaborations among the participants that are both multidisciplinary and multinational.