Ben Nachman, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division, co-organized the 15th International Workshop on Boosted Object Phenomenology, Reconstruction, Measurements, and Searches at Colliders – BOOST 23 – on July 31- August 4, 2023. Over 150 registrants, representing over 16 countries on 5 continents, participated in this hybrid event, including 100 people who attended the event onsite in Berkeley Lab’s Building 50 Auditorium. The workshop sponsors also included UC Davis, Cal State East Bay, and LLNL.
This year’s conference was distinguished by participation from all 4 of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments, along with two more experiments (STAR at BNL and H1 at DESY) that had not been represented before. According to Nachman, “Jets are ubiquitous at particle colliders, and studying them has led to exciting cross-cutting methodology and science between particle physics and nuclear physics and between various experiments.”
The workshop is part of a series of joint theory/experiment workshops that bring together leading experts from physics theory and LHC/RHIC experiments to discuss recent progress and to develop new approaches to the reconstruction of and use of jet substructure to study Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and look for physics beyond the Standard Model. The conference covered the following topics:
- Searches for new particles (phenomenology and experiment)
- QCD calculations and measurements in vacuum or in medium from any collision system
- Jet reconstruction and calibration
- Other aspects of hadronic final state reconstruction, such as pileup mitigation
- New observables and techniques (including machine learning)
- Studies related to future colliders.