Online Sustainable HEP Workshop (28-30 June 2021)

3 Mar 2021

Our member Niklas Beisert (ETH Zurich) is part of the organizing committee of the online Sustainable HEP Workshop which will take place 28-30 June 2021.

Outline

Sustainability is one of the key challenges of our time. As physicists, we deal with observations, data and scientific results on a daily basis, and we thus have a natural access to the magnitude of the problem and its implications. This workshop aims at reflecting on and discussing our own future role in this situation: International collaboration and exchange is at the heart of the global physics community, in particular also the High-Energy Physics (HEP) community. Until early 2020, the building and upkeep of international research networks went hand in hand with frequent air travel, resulting in high amounts of CO2 emissions.

The necessary changes to our travel culture that 2020 enforced, have taught us two things: Online formats, while differing in some aspects from in-person meetings, are a viable and functioning format for seminars, workshops, conferences, collaboration and committee meetings. 2020 has brought about a steep learning curve for many in the HEP community who organized online formats and went about improving them, adding networking opportunities in various forms, reflecting on asynchronous content to accommodate different time zones and solving initial problems with these formats. This learning process is not finished, yet, a number of best-practise examples already exist and are worth sharing.

2020 has also shown us that the shift from online to in-person meetings is not just a question of climate-sustainability, but also a question of social justice. Numerous online meetings have had a much higher number of participants than their in-person equivalents. In particular, participants who do not have a travel budget and/or who have to go through a potentially costly visa-application of uncertain outcome, can participate in online formats with much greater ease. This enables the participation of a large group of scientists who are de facto excluded from in-person formats.

These benefits of online-formats for climate sustainability and social justice motivate us to ask "What is the route towards a sustainable HEP community"? Our workshop aims at bringing together researchers from the (broadly defined) HEP community who represent the various important views and perspectives that need to be accounted for in order to find viable, practicable and balanced answers to this question.

Workshop Plan

Time:

• 28 – 30 June 2021, afternoons

Organisers:

• Niklas Beisert (ETH Zürich)

• Valerie Domcke (CERN)

• Astrid Eichhorn (CP3-Origins, University of Southern Denmark)

• Kai Schmitz (CERN)

Venue:

• virtual via zoom, mattermost and other platforms

• workshop website: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1004432/

• local workshop hubs might be installed at SwissMAP institutions (pending pandemic situation)

Planned Sessions:

• individual talks:

◦ The climate challenge and the HEP community

◦ Presentation of the paper "Astronomy in a low-carbon future" (arXiv:1910:01272)

• panel discussions:

◦ The challenge of climate-sustainable academia from an institutional perspective

◦ The social-justice dimension of online formats

• best-practise examples:

◦ experience from 2020 workshops and conferences

◦ flash talks and discussions in breakout rooms

• social activities during breaks:

◦ trial of different online meeting tools

Phase I & II research project(s)

Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship under Horizon 2020

Imaginary Numbers May Be Essential for Describing Reality