In Memoriam            Our Friend Thomas 

 By now you must all know of the sad and tragic demise of our friend, collaborator and long time Les Houches participant. He is one of the few never to have missed an event since 1999 as he enjoyed both the physics and the mountains. His first post-doc was at LAPTH and he has been a very  regular visitor at LAPTH for work and leisure. Besides all the physics he contributed to, he helped us with the nitty gritty of Les Houches organisation: carrying tables and chairs to Les Houches and such things. Above all he was our friend. Just to tell you how deeply saddened and shocked we are so that you can excuse us about the relative delay in announcing this news of  the site only now. 
The last thing Thomas was working on was the NLO MC accord. To fulfill the wish of Thomas, the paper will appear very soon. It will be, as the whole 2009 session, dedicated to the memory of, and in tribute to, Thomas, who led the effort to develop this proposal for Les Houches 2009. Thomas led the discussions, set up the subgroups, collected the contributions, and wrote and edited this paper. He made a promise that the paper would be on the ArXiv the first week of January, and we will  faithfully fulfill his promise. In his honor, we would like to call this the Binoth Les Houches Accord. 

Aim and Format of the Workshop

    This Workshop is the sixth in a series whose aim is to bring together theorists and experimentalists working on the phenomenology of the upcoming TeV colliders. The emphasis will be on physics at the LHC with a particular attention on the one hand on the progress in new techniques for the simulation of Standard Model processes and on the other on the latest developments concerning new mechanisms of symmetry breaking and the New Physics.  These activities will be conducted in close connection with the development and improvements of tools in particular of Monte-Carlo event generators.

    Themes to be covered in the Workshop range from Quantum ChromoDynamics to the mechanism of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking and  Higgs physics, models of  New Physics and their  phenomenology. The interdependence between the signals from the New Physics and their respective backgrounds will be stressed. Three Working Groups have been set up covering these different aspects of the Physics at the LHC.

• SM and NLO Multi-leg will address the issue of the theoretical predictions for multileg processes, in particular beyond leading order, and the possibility of implementing these calculations in Monte Carlos. This working group aims at a cross breeding between novel approaches (twistors, unitarity cuts,...) and improvements in standard techniques. The precision NLO and in some instances NNLO predictions extend also to Higgs observables. 
• New Physics  is a beyond SM group. The emphasis this year will be on alternatives to SUSY that address the problem of symmetry breaking, although some aspects of SUSY phenomenology will be addressed. It will also address the issues of model reconstruction and model independent searches based on topologies.
• Tools and Monte Carlos. This working group will liaise with the  SM and New Physics WGs with the task of incorporating some of the issues and new techniques developed in these groups in view of improving Monte Carlos and setting standards and accords among the simulation codes to better meet the experimental needs.   Issues concerning pdf and jets will also be covered within this WG. In session I the emphasis will be on standard model issues in close connection with the SM/NLO Working Group while in sessions II the emphasis will be on the implementation of new models.

    As usual within the Les Houches PhysTeV series, we expect a strong interplay and collaboration between these different groups and their subgroups. The projects are to start in January 2009 and should be completed by the end of the year 2009.

    The meeting at les Houches, between June 8th and June 26th 2009, will be the central point of the Workshop where, in addition to the Working Group activities, a few lectures and review talks are planned. Participation to the Workshop is open to all. However, due to space limitation in Les Houches, attendance to the meeting is limited to 70 participants at any given point. Due to the overwhelming response of the past five sessions, this session is over a period of almost 3 weeks. Though we expect some participants to attend the full duration of the meeting, plans will be made so that a certain number of participants cover either the first or second half of the meeting, allowing us to accommodate about 110-120 participants in total this time.

    Les Houches Centre for Physics is located in the French Alps, about an hour from Geneva and an hour from Annecy. The Centre has a tradition of organising Schools, Workshops and Conferences for more than five decades now and boasts an excellent library. For the purpose of this Workshop a special computing system will be installed.

Sponsors

Financed by the  European Union Marie Curie  Conferences and Training Courses  Contract: CT-2006-046171	Formation permanente

Poster