Physicists from across the country visited Argonne National Laboratory in April for a two-day workshop designed to generate new ideas and projects in the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Sponsored by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the “Lattice for Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) Physics 2016” workshop brought together 37 experimentalists, lattice gauge theorists, and continuum phenomenologists to present recent findings and explore opportunities for collaboration. The ALCF is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

“The primary motivation for this workshop is to stimulate discussion between the computational, phenomenological, and experimental communities,” said James Osborn, an ALCF computational scientist, who was on the organizing committee for the workshop. “There are rapid developments coming from all sides, so it’s important to get together regularly to identify the most interesting studies and calculations to pursue.”

This year’s event, which marked the seventh workshop in the series, was particularly timely as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently restarted “Run 2” after a few months off for maintenance. In December, scientists at the LHC reported possible hints of a mysterious new particle with observations of diphoton resonance at 750 GeV.

“These workshops are always valuable, but it’s an especially exciting time with the recent LHC findings generating a lot of buzz in the community,” said Julius Kuti, professor at University of California, San Diego. “If confirmed, this would be the first messenger of new physics beyond the Standard Model.”

To view presentations from this year’s workshop, visit http://lbsm16.alcf.anl.gov/agenda/