Understanding the Standard Model

Call for Papers

After the evidence that has been released by the LHC collaborations Atlas and CMS on July 4 of a new neutral particle of about 126 GeV decaying to two photons and to four leptons, time has come for the particle physics community to go further. This means that we have to devise strategies how to explore as thoroughly and as rapidly as possible the properties of the new particle to understand whether it is indeed the long-sought Standard Model Higgs boson, another kind of Higgs, or something completely different. In addition, even if this particle is indeed the Higgs, it calls for precision tests of the Standard Model to check whether there is still the possibility for accessible physics beyond the Standard Model.

The discovery of a Higgs boson should not be the end of particle physics, because the existence of the Higgs boson does not answer several basic questions about the Standard Model. As far as the Standard Model is concerned, the aesthetical criticisms that have since long made to it are still there. To mention just a few, why are there three elementary fermion families? Why do the fermions have so strikingly different masses? Why does the Standard Model need so many parameters to describe nature? Even more intriguing, there should be a connection between the known existence of nonbaryonic dark matter and some particle that still may be discovered.

Some of these questions may already be addressed using the LHC, but other future facilities like ILC may also shed a different light on them.

We invite investigators to contribute with original articles as well as review articles giving a broad picture of possible strategies to set-up precision tests of the Standard Model and to address all shortcomings outlined above. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Precision tests of the Standard Model at LHC or at other future facilities
• Possible models of nonbaryonic dark matter and prospects for direct detection
• Interpretation of the resonance discovered by CMS and ATLAS in extensions of the Standard Model, especially models without a Higgs
• Models predicting or interpreting the observed spectrum of the elementary fermion masses

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ahep/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ahep/stm/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Philippe Schwemling, Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Energies, Paris, France

Guest Editors

• Roman Poeschl, Laboratoire de l Accélérateur Linéaire, Orsay, France
• Klaus Moenig, DESY-Zeuthen, Platanenallee 6, 15735 Zeuthen, Germany