A panel of the nation's top particle physicists, chaired by University of California, Berkeley, theoretician Hitoshi Murayama, has issued its final report recommending how the U.S. government should commit its high-energy physics research funds for the next decade and beyond, focusing on neutrinos, dark matter and the cosmic microwave background.
The report by the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) was approved on Friday, Dec. 8, by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) and will be sent to the two main funding agencies for physics in the U.S. — the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) — to aid them in their decisions about which research to fund. The HEPAP, a permanent advisory committee to DOE and NSF, constitutes a prioritization panel every 10 years.
The panel, consisting of 31 members and one ex-officio member from the U.S. and abroad, considered only large- and medium-sized physics research projects — the kind that can take years or decades to plan and build, enlist contributions from thousands of scientists and cost billions of dollars.