HP2006 –Overview

Hard Probes conference focuses on jet quenching (article in CERN Courier)

Hard Probes (and Soft Ones) to Test the Quark-Gluon Soup (article in Science@Berkeley Lab)

Goals

As demonstrated by recent experimental results from RHIC, hard and electromagnetic probes have become increasingly important for the study of high-energy nuclear collisions. They provide unique and powerful tools for the exploration of both dense matter and the initial conditions preceding its formation. The Hard Probes conferences are a natural consequence of the growing interest in this area of physics, covering the following topics:

• Jets and high transverse momentum hadrons
• Heavy flavor hadrons and quarkonia
• Photons and dileptons
• Initial parton distributions in nuclei

Participation

The conference will consist of both invited plenary and contributed parallel presentations, as well as a poster session, with an optional excursion for a half day. There will be a brief student program on Basics of Perturbative QCD and Jet Physics. The conference will end with the conference banquet on the evening of Thursday, June 15. In order to facilitate extensive and in-depth discussions during the conference, we will limit the number of participants to 150.

Venue

The conference will be held at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, California, on June 9-16, 2006. The Asilomar Conference Grounds is part of the California State Park system with accommodations amidst natural surroundings. It has 107 acres of forest, dunes, and coastline situated right on Asilomar State Beach. Nearby towns and attractions include Monterey with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Carmel-by-the-Sea and Pebble Beach Golf Club on the Seventeen Mile Drive, all within a short drive.

Proceedings

The conference proceedings will be published by Elsevier as a special issue of Nuclear Physics A.