28 July 2020 to 6 August 2020
virtual conference
Europe/Prague timezone

Newsletter - August 6

Today’s premiere sessions begin at 08:00 CEST to be convenient for attendees based in Asia and Oceania.

Message from the Director: Thank you to the ICHEP team & Invitation to ICHEPs 2022 and 2024

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It’s time for many thanks! This newsletter would become far too long if I listed all people that contributed - the full list will be in the backup slides of my closeout talk. But I would like to list the key groups here. We owe thanks for their advice to the previous organisers, C11 and IAC members. Over 80 conveners of the parallel session spent weeks to select abstracts, chair parallel, poster, and discussion sessions and will be asked to help with the proceedings. Distinguished members of our community acted as plenary session chairs and discussion panel moderators. Members of LOC and working groups prepared each aspect of the traditional conference together with the congress organizer C-IN. After moving online many IT experts joined our team. Each parallel session was supervised by 1-2 assistants - up to 30 in total for each day. Others worked on video conversions and editing for YouTube and CDS and prepared the links or newsletter. Many prepared the PR and outreach programme. I must not forget generous support of national and international institutions which allowed us to waive the fee.

Planning is already underway for ICHEP2022 in Bologna and ICHEP2024 in Prague. We hope you enjoy the final day of ICHEP2020, and we hope to see you again, both virtually and in person, at ICHEP in the future.

ICHEP 2020 experience - we want to hear from YOU!

The first ever online ICHEP2020 is coming to an end. We would like you to tell us how you liked various aspects of our conference? There will be many further conferences down the road which are now discussing the best way to proceed and asking other organisers to share their experiences. We would be very grateful if you filled out this survey by 20 Aug.

Recommended by… Peter Shanahan, Fermilab, NOvA co-spokesperson

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"Luckily with the plenary we can see all the talks without having to choose, but of course I am looking forward to the neutrino session in particular. We recently saw several very interesting new results at Neutrino 2020, and with 5 weeks having passed since then, I expect the presentations will reflect some synthesis of the new results and what they tell us about the future directions. And of course the session will be additionally informative for those who were not able to attend Neutrino."

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Recommended by… Abhay Deshpande, Stony Brook University/BNL, EIC Science Director

"The Electron Ion Collider (EIC) in the US got the much awaited CD0 (“go ahead”) from the US DOE and in January 2020 it was announced that the EIC, built jointly by BNL and Jlab, will be located at BNL. The international EIC Users Group, currently boasts about 1100 users from 32 countries, with 30% and 20% participation from Europe & Asia respectively. Strong collaborations and contributions from non-US users and their institutions are expected to enhance the scientific program at the EIC. I look forward to this session where future colliders and the recently concluded European Particle Physics Strategy Update (EPPSU) exercise will be presented, both of which are of great interest to the EIC enthusiasts."

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ICHEP Interview: Eckhard Elsen

We invite you to watch Eckhard Elsen, CERN Director for Research and Computing, discuss his impressions of ICHEP2020, the exciting results that CERN has produced for the conference, and how to go about planning for the future - balancing expected advances with the possibility of truly unexpected discoveries.

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ICHEP Interview: Masanori Yamauchi and Toru Iijima

How do you run a particle physics experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic? In this video KEK Director General, Masanori Yamauchi, and Belle II Spokesperson, Toru Iijima, describe how KEK was forced to adapt to the pandemic, and how the SuperKEKB accelerator and Belle II experiment were able to not only continue running during their Spring 2020 Run, but also set a new world record instantaneous luminosity!

View of an Early Career Scientist: Jakub Ceska

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I feel very honored to get the opportunity to attend and contribute to the ICHEP2020 physics program. I am an undergraduate student of experimental particle physics at the Czech Technical University in Prague and this was my first chance to present my research in a conference ever. I am interested in Upsilon production in the STAR experiment at RHIC. I spent almost the last two years working on this project and I was preparing my poster for the last two months. This conference is a wonderful way for young scientists to get to know how much is happening in the field and find out how they can contribute. Originally I was a bit nervous about participating, but the welcoming community and well prepared program made this an amazing experience for me.

Zdenek Dolezal: Audience statistics

For a traditional conference, one has to assign auditoria of different sizes to the parallel sessions. Therefore we paid a lot of attention to a typical occupancy of the parallel sessions. I still have photos of the parallel auditoria in Chicago and Seoul. With the online conference, these statistics are much easier to obtain - Zoom reports provide detailed info on the attendance. Let us share with you some numbers and plots.

Overall, 2452 people have attended our online sessions so far, for a total of 10965 person-hours - a mean of 4.5 hours per person, with a median of 3.1 hours per person.

The first plot shows the number of unique attendees per parallel session. This roughly follows the number of abstracts submitted. The second plot shows a number of unique participants per day. We can see that the numbers vary between 500 and 1300. We should add about 200 YouTube visitors during premieres and further 400 during replays. The numbers are apparently higher than in past ICHEPs, but are much lower than the total number of registrants. Before we draw conclusions, let’s wait for the full luminosity!

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