Physics and Astronomy Department hosting international workshop May 14-17

World's experts on the charm quark to gather and confer during four days of intense sessons

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Tom Browder, (808) 956-2936
Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Fred Harris, (808) 956-2940
Professor, Physics and Astronomy
Posted: May 9, 2012

CHARM2012 Workshop
CHARM2012 Workshop
The High Energy Physics group of the UH Manoa Department of Physics and Astronomy is hosting a prestigious international workshop on the physics of the charm quark at the East-West Center from May 14 - 17, 2012. Over one hundred participants from universities and national labs from Europe, Japan, China, Korea, India and the United States will participate in the CHARM2012 workshop.
 
Previous workshops in this series were held in Beijing, at Cornell University and in Leimen, Germany. Several new results from experiments at CERN in Switzerland, KEK in Japan, and IHEP in China are expected to be announced for the first time at this meeting in Hawaii.

Ordinary matter is composed of protons and neutrons, which are in turn made up of three quarks (two up quarks and a down quark for the proton and two down quarks and an up quark for the neutron). In addition to the up and down quarks there are four other types of quarks (charm, bottom, strange and top). These are produced in high energy particle accelerators ("atom smashers") and in cosmic rays.  The charm quark was discovered 38 years ago; Burton Richter and Samuel C.C. Ting received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for this seminal discovery.
 
Current research on the charm quark focuses on charm mixing, asymmetries between charm and anti-charm quark decays and exotic bound states containing charm quarks. It is possible that this research will lead to the discovery of physics beyond the "Standard Model." These issues will be discussed during four days of intense sessions at the CHARM2012 workshop. The meeting is supported by UH Manoa and the U.S. Department of Energy.

For more information see http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/charm2012/.