YPP - Meeting

Those present:

Bonnie Fleming, John Krane, Sam Zeller,
Florencia Canelli, Robin Erbacher, George Fleming, Eric Hawker, Mike Hildreth,
Sabine Lammers (DESY), Jocelyn Monroe, Gudi Moortgat-Pick (DESY), Jen Raaf,
Morgan Wascko, and Gordon Watts.

Discussion Agenda:

• Involvement at Snowmass
• Discussion of Sample Topics

Meeting Minutes: recorded by Sam Zeller

Snowmass:
The meeting opened with a discussion of a possible format for gathering the consensus of young people at Snowmass. The following is the model we are currently working off of:

• week 1: questionnaire
• week 2: town meeting
• week 3: forum + open survey
• week 3: plenary session?

Town Meeting:

This is a less-formal meeting of young physicists at Snowmass in advance of the forum on the 17th. This meeting will be centered on open discussion of the issues before us and will be heavily moderated in order to keep the discussion "on topic". Pre-determined topics will be presented via overhead slides. A panel of experts will be on-hand in the front row to answer questions and refute falsehoods. Moderators will travel through the audience with microphones. We anticipate a lot of straw polls and a free flow of ideas. The aim is to try and find the consensus (of course, the consensus might be that we cannot achieve consensus at this point). The means for achieving this will be through "live summaries" - moderators will post consensus live on overheads as the meeting continues, whereby these conclusions can be discussed or reformed as needed.

Forum:

This is scheduled on the evening of July 17th. It is at this meeting, of both young and old, that structured presentations are made. We hope these presentations will have a strong overlap with the topics of the town meeting. The exact format is up to Ken. The main purpose is to give a "coherent view of the state of our community". This will most likely be a summary session.

Survey:

YPP administers a web-based survey of as many young physicists we can reach, in particular those not at Snowmass. We should have a working version ready before Snowmass. We see no reason not to have this formed beforehand unless we think the first town meeting will strongly affect the content of the survey. The questions are exactly the same ones that are in the questionnaire, also what we talked about in the town meeting. The format is both multiple choice and essay. It is critical that we propagate this information to everyone's home institutions. We plan to write up the results and deliver them to the HEPAP subpanel, who have already expressed their interest. It is important that we have this available as soon after Snowmass as possible. We anticipate the survey will remain open 1-2 weeks following Snowmass.

Sample List of Discussion Topics:
It is important that we concentrate on issues on which we have a unique perspective. These are topics that will be the content of the questionnaire, survey and town meeting(s), many of which are based on suggestions/input from Ken Bloom (Snowmass Forum Chair), John Bagger (HEPAP Subpanel Chair) and our earlier meetings. Here is where our preliminary brainstorming got us:

• (0) Physics:
  
  • - What are you working on right now?
    (this is a bias we should know about at least for the survey)
  • - What physics would you find most compelling in the next 20-30 years? Rank options.
  • - What do you think is the most important physics for the field over the next 20-30 years?
    What do you think the field should focus on?
  • - Has Snowmass or "the process" changed your opinion? What has affected your opinion?
  • - What is HEP? (see comments below under "suggestions")

• (1) Building the Field:
  
  • - How do we encourage talented young people to do graduate work in HEP?
    
  • - What is it that attracted you to HEP?
  • - What is the hook? How do we encourage young people to stay in the field? What kept you?

• (2) Globalization:
  
  • - Will you be inspired to work on a project you rarely see?
  • - If students, postdocs are located at the experiment and their supervisor is not, how does this affect the quality of supervision?
  • - How do you envision this global "online" collaboration working?
  • - Does this become easier if we have "regional centers"? Where are these regional centers located (more or less frequently distributed than the national labs?)?
  • - What will be the role of the national labs in such a model? Will the labs close? Is this ok?
  • - Which model do we embrace to sustain a strong domestic program?

• (3) Balance:
  
  • - Is there the right mix of big and small experiments?
    (we need to quantify what constitutes a small/medium/large experiment)
  • - Is there the right mix of university vs. lab involvement?
  • - Is there the right mix of accelerator vs. non-accelerator based physics?
  • - How important is diversification?

• (4) Finding Consensus/Picking a Plan:
  
  • - What have you done to educate yourself? How much do you know about each option?
  • - Do you think you know enough to form a decision?
  • - Do you feel as if you are being forced to make a particular decision? If so, what?
    (age will correlate with this)

Some Suggestions for the Snowmass Meeting(s):

• George suggested that the meetings should be archived as web broadcasts so that people who are unable to attend Snowmass can at least listen in from their home institutions and comment later. We should request video. If this is not available, this can probably be done on a "shoestring" budget. OSU has video equipment that was used for DPF2000 that we could probably borrow, but we would prefer to not have to lug this to Colorado. It might also be useful to study how things ran at DPF2000, where they held a more open town meeting.

• Gordon warned that we are "self selecting" the people who are providing input to this process, namely the people at Snowmass. We need to be aware of this bias. We need to get out minutes (web-based?) to those we cannot attend so that people can comment. The survey will help cover this, but it needs to have as wide a bandwidth as possible.

• The issue of "which physics do you find most compelling" can come first as a means of warming up the audience. Many of the other questions depend on this. What's driving this is people's opinions on the physics.

• We need to set a strict time limit on each topic. We can come back to them at the end if necessary.

• Issues on physics/machines can easily polarize the audience. We need highly skilled moderators.
  This CANNOT turn into a gripe session. Again, we need skilled moderators.

• In deciding (0) "what is the most compelling physics", Morgan pointed out that is important that we define what HEP is. Is it both accelerator and non-accelerator based physics? Nuclear? Astrophysics? In deciding what is compelling we have to think not only what can come out of an accelerator.

• It might be useful for the globalization issue (2) to explore the details of the funding structure for these regional centers. Research how the LHC model will work, for example. Gudi agreed to help research how the LHC plans to deal with globalization issues.

• Gudi feels that globalization (2) is the issue we should concentrate on; that this idea of a world-wide data center where no one is excluded is completely new and needs to be addressed. She feels this is the one main topic.

• We need a means of getting foreign students involved in this process. As Florencia pointed out, non-American students make up 40% of the University of Rochester student body. We can learn a lot from them; they have already had to face many of these issues. This might be better addressed by a special HEPAP forum centered on foreign institutions, but it is clear we need outreach: foreign students should care about U.S. HEP since this will have a big impact on world HEP.

• We need to be careful about issue (4) "picking a plan". As Jocelyn pointed out, it may be the case that not all of the options are at a stage where we have all the information to pick *one*.

• We should maintain a separate "Life in HEP" section as part of the survey. This will contain personal information such as "what type of outreach have you been involved in?", "what type of physics are you currently involved in", "how well funded are you", etc. - including select information on age and demographics.

We concluded the meeting with a promise to come up with a draft of the survey/questionnaire and town meeting slides so that these can be reviewed as soon as possible.