ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP) Established with 7-year $25 Million Grant. (June 9, 2011)

CoEPP was officially opened today and is a collaborative research venture between The Universities of Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Monash. Each institution is pledged to contribute additional funding to the Centre, with The University of Melbourne hosting the head office.

The purpose of the centre is to bring together Australian experimentalists, and theorists as part of the ATLAS collaboration, to focus on the data expected to be derived from CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The stated objectives of CoEPP are, together with international colleagues, to search for:

• evidence for the Higgs boson,

• Supersymmetry (SUSY),

• evidence of extra dimensions, and other exotic phenomena at the Terascale (Tera electron-Volt -- TeV or 10¹² eV),

• the origin of dark matter,

• unknown forces of Nature at the Terascale.

In addition it will look to developing new computing techniques for LHC / ATLAS data analysis, and being prepared for the unexpected.

It remains to be seen as to whether CoEPP will receive the resources in material and personnel to attain the status of a world-class research centre. In addition CoEPP's board is yet to be named. It's to be hoped that the problems encountered in the governance of the Australian Synchrotron will be avoided.