Search

For the field of high energy physics to continue to have a bright future,priority within the field must be given to investments in the development ofboth evolutionary and transformational detector development that is coordinatedacross the national laboratories and with the university community,international partners and other disciplines. While the fundamental sciencequestions addressed by high energy physics have never been more compelling,there is acute awareness of the challenging budgetary and technical constraintswhen scaling current technologies. Furthermore, many technologies are reachingtheir sensitivity limit and new approaches need to be developed to overcome thecurrently irreducible technological challenges. This situation is unfoldingagainst a backdrop of declining funding for instrumentation, both at thenational laboratories and in particular at the universities. This trend has tobe reversed for the country to continue to play a leadership role in particlephysics, especially in this most promising era of imminent new discoveries thatcould finally break the hugely successful, but limited, Standard Model offundamental particle interactions. In this challenging environment it isessential that the community invest anew in instrumentation and optimize theuse of the available resources to develop new innovative, cost-effectiveinstrumentation, as this is our best hope to successfully accomplish themission of high energy physics. This report summarizes the current status ofinstrumentation for high energy physics, the challenges and needs of futureexperiments and indicates high priority research areas.

The first flight of the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment recorded 16 radio signals that were emitted by cosmic-ray induced air showers. The dominant contribution to the radiation comes from the deflection of positrons and electrons in the geomagnetic field, which is beamed in the direction of motion of the air shower. For 14 of these events, this radiation is reflected from the ice and subsequently detected by the ANITA experiment at a flight altitude of ∼36 km. In this paper, we estimate the energy of the 14 individual events and find that the mean energy of the cosmic-ray sample is 2.9 × 1018 eV, which is significantly lower than the previous estimate. By simulating the ANITA flight, we calculate its exposure for ultra-high energy cosmic rays. We estimate for the first time the cosmic-ray flux derived only from radio observations and find agreement with measurements performed at other observatories. In addition, we find that the ANITA data set is consistent with Monte Carlo simulations for the total number of observed events and with the properties of those events.

As part of the Snowmass process, the Cosmic Frontier WIMP Direct Detectionsubgroup (CF1) has drawn on input from the Cosmic Frontier and the broaderParticle Physics community to produce this document. The charge to CF1 was (a)to summarize the current status and projected sensitivity of WIMP directdetection experiments worldwide, (b) motivate WIMP dark matter searches over abroad parameter space by examining a spectrum of WIMP models, (c) establish acommunity consensus on the type of experimental program required to explorethat parameter space, and (d) identify the common infrastructure required topractically meet those goals.