January 2026 Newsletter

Dear DPF members,

Please find below the monthly DPF newsletter for January 2026. This newsletter will be archived on the DPF website. If you would like an announcement included in the February 2026 newsletter, please contact the DPF Secretary/Treasurer. Please keep requests to 300 words and submit them by the 10th of the month for consideration.

DPF is the primary community organization for particle physicists in the United States. You can directly support our activities by making a donation at this link (log in with your APS credentials).

Best wishes,

Ken Bloom, DPF Secretary/Treasurer, kenbloom@unl.edu

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Message from the 2026 DPF Chair

Dear Colleagues,

The 2026 DPF chair line and executive committee (https://engage.aps.org/dpf/governance/executive-committee/committee-members) are excited about working with you in service to our field this year. We have a number of exciting things planned:

We look forward to seeing you at GPS26 (https://summit.aps.org/) in Denver. We have an exciting program of invited and contributed talks, and our annual business meeting Wednesday evening.
FNAL will host DPF26 20-24 July. This will be a great opportunity to discuss recent changes in the field as a community, as well as hear about new exciting results and plans for the future.
We will work with the agencies to find mechanisms to continue community input to the future of our field in these changing times.
And as always there will be new Fellows elected and prizes awarded in recognition of our field’s progress.

Finally we would like to encourage you to reach out to me as chair or any member of the executive committee with ideas on how DPF can best serve our community. We also encourage you to invite your friends to join DPF, our field’s grass-roots advocacy organization.

Sarah Eno, U. Maryland

eno@umd.edu

Chair, DPF

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December 2025 DPF Community Meeting Summary

The DPF Community Meeting held on December 18-19, 2025, welcomed over 800 registrants and included reports and discussion of numerous topics of interest to our community.

This included overviews by DOE officers (Bryan Field, Kathleen Turner, and Manuel Bautista) regarding the Cosmic Frontier and (from Jeremy Love) the Genesis Mission, as well as an introduction to the HEP program from Gina Rameika. This was followed by a report from Young-Kee Kim on Modernizing Fermilab and one from Mary Convery on the evolution of the Fermilab accelerator complex. Stephen Gourlay introduced the National Laboratory Accelerator Study Group for a Muon Collider, and Soren Prestemon overviewed magnet development for future colliders. The first day concluded with a presentation by Susannah Howieson on navigating the federal science budget, one by Lauren Larson on U.S. Particle Physics Content Group Activities, and an announcement by Tulika Bose of a community driven white paper on HEP AI/ML opportunities.

Aaron Dominguez opened the second day with a report on National Science Board initiatives. This was followed by a talk entitled "HEP-NP Synergies" from Marcel Demarteau and then an overview by John Hill of high energy and nuclear physics at Brookhaven. Stefan Soeldner-Rembold overviewed the U.S. neutrino program. Talks on a proposed near-term lower energy future hadron collider (Elliot Lipeles) and Linear Collider Facility (Emilio Nanni) followed. The second day concluded with a report by Tor Raubenheimer on FCC developments, a report on the European Strategy by Mike Tuts, and, from Hitoshi Murayama, the DPF Response to the European Strategy. A brief Open Community Discussion closed the second day.

The complete agenda with posted slides and recordings of most talks can be found at

https://indico.global/event/15767/.

-Sally Seidel and Heidi Schellman

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Early Bird Registration for Global Physics Summit ends January 28

The APS Global Physics Summit – the successor to the APS April Meeting that DPF participated in – will be held March 16-20, 2026 in Denver, Colorado. Early bird registration for the event with reduced fees ends on January 28. As part of the meeting, DPF will hold its annual business meeting at 5:30 PM on Wednesday, March 18, with hors d'oeuvres served. Find more information at https://www.aps.org/events/2026/joint-meeting-2026.

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Community-driven AI/ML Whitepaper

The experimental HEP community is collaborating on a community-driven whitepaper that outlines our vision for AI/ML and identifies key opportunities and gaps in achieving that vision. This document is intended for policy makers, funding agencies, and potential collaborators outside HEP, and aims to align with the Genesis Mission.

For additional context, please see this presentation [video recording] at the DPF Townhall in December 2025.

Contributions received thus far from the community are in this google doc. A first draft of the whitepaper will be shared with the community in February, followed by an opportunity to provide feedback and/or endorse the paper.

Questions or comments?
Contact:

Ian Fisk (ifisk@flatironinstitute.org)
Peter Elmer (Peter.Elmer@cern.ch)
Tulika Bose (tulika@hep.wisc.edu)

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News from the Coordinating Panel for Advanced Detectors (CPAD)

Highlight of Ongoing RDC activities for preparing Multi-Institutional HEP Detector R&D Proposals

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics has released the FY 2026 continuation of the Detector R&D Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) (DE-FOA-0003600). In anticipation of strong community engagement, the CPAD Research Development Collaborations (RDCs) are working teams who are planning or considering a multi-institutional HEP Detector R&D proposal to help identify synergies, foster collaboration, and ensure broad awareness of emerging proposal concepts across our community. This is intended for teams that are university lead (and thus covered in DE-FOR-0003600) as well as DOE lab based proposals (for which we are still anticipating a NOFO to be released).

2026 CPAD Members

The DPF Executive Committee appointed the following members:

Chair Jonathan Asaadi (UTA), Vice Chair Jinlong Zhang (ANL)

Nural Akchurin (TTU), Michalis Bachtis (UCLA), Eric Dahl (Northwestern), Prakhar Garg (Yale), Prashansa Mukim (BNL), Sally Seidel (UNM), Mitch Soderberg (Syracuse), Ritoban Basu Thakur (Caltech), Laura di Vacri (PNNL), Silvia Zorzetti (FNAL)

CPAD workshop 2026

The next CPAD workshop will take place on Oct 20-23, 2026 at University of Washington.

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Save the Date: DPF26

The 2026 edition of the APS Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) meeting will be held at Fermilab on July 20-24, 2026. More information to come!

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IUPAP C11 Early Career Scientist Prize – Nominations for 2026

The Commission on Particles and Fields (C11) of IUPAP solicits nominations of outstanding young experimental or theoretical particle physicists for the two 2026 Early Career Scientist Prizes.

The prizes, each consisting of an IUPAP medal and a cash (CHF1000) award, will be presented at the 43rd International Conference on High Energy Physics, Natal, Brazil, on July 30th - August 5th, 2026.

Candidates for the prize should have a maximum of 8 years of research experience (excluding career interruptions) following the PhD.

Nominations for the IUPAP Particles and Fields Early Career Scientist Prizes:

can be made by experimental or theoretical particle physicists who know the work of the nominee well and include a citation statement.
should consist of a minimum of two and a maximum of three letters explaining the nominee's qualifications and scientific achievements, a complete CV, and a list of publications. In addition, if the nominee is a member of a large international experiment with a long list of publications signed by all or a large part of the collaboration, a list of up to 20 papers that demonstrate the work the candidate has done either as a leader or strong participant should be provided.
must include a proposed award citation of 50 words or fewer describing the contributions of the nominee.

Recipients of IUPAP Awards are expected to meet the commonly held standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity. Nominators should include a statement saying that, to the best of their knowledge, there are no concerns that IUPAP should be aware of regarding the nominee satisfying this expectation.

The nominator should collect the material and upload it at https://iupap-ecsp.desy.de/. All material should be submitted before February 1st, 2026, at 12:00 PM CET.

Marcelo Munhoz (chair) for IUPAP C11 (2025-2027).

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