107th Plenary ECFA meeting
"The 107th Plenary ECFA meeting was held this month. Open sessions hapenned on 19-20 November 2020 in virtual mode. Together with reports on future colliders and collider technologies, they included a special session on gamma-factories"
More info can be found here. The Restricted ECFA committee members, considering that a clear story will need to emerge that fascinates society as a whole and fosters a strong support for particle physics research, broughts to ECFA plenary session a set of pitches of inspiring stories we all have. We copy below a nice text writen by our coleague Marko Mikuz about the future of this future of research.
"Particle Physics Detectors – Contemporary Cathedrals of Science. Designed, constructed and operated by thousands of scientists and engineers. Engineering Colossuses of tens of metres yet built precisely to a fraction of a millimeter. Thousands of tonnes of meticulously instrumented material built to measure products of highest energy collisions accessible to humankind in conditions resembling those of the Big Bang. With hundred million individual sensors per square metre close to the collision point, exposed for ten years to a radiation environment no human would survive for twenty minutes. Metres of lead and steel to stop the most energetic particles in order to measure their energy. Capable of capturing an image of the sway of thousands of collision products, with a tiny slate possibly emerging from a massive particle that weighs thousands of hydrogen atoms and lives an unthinkable trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Acquiring data from the detector implies handling in excess of a billion collisions per second and sorting out the interesting processes in real time. In ten years of operation, collecting more than ten thousand trillion of collisions, we were able to discover the elusive Higgs boson and measure its properties. Yet the majority of the contents of the Universe, the Dark side of it, is still holding up to its name. To unveil it, a refurbishment of detectors with the aim of coping with higher energy and even more collisions is in progress. So, keep in touch with modern cathedral building!"