Particle Physics 2014

For particle and astroparticle physics at DESY, the year 2014 was marked by many activities and high expectations for major new projects as well as exciting new scientific results.At the very start of the year, DESY’s strategic proposals for the next programme-oriented funding period (POF III) of the Helmholtz Association were scrutinised by an international team of expert – and found to be of first quality, in both particle and astroparticle physics. These top-rate results lend us the support and stable base funding for our plans for the next five years. The new POF III period, which started at the beginning of 2015, also saw a reorganisation of the Helmholtz research area “Matter”: the former programmes “Elementary Particle Physics” and “Astroparticle Physics” were joined with the activities in hadronic and nuclear physics to form a new programme called “Matter and the Universe”, which involves, alongside DESY, the Helmholtz centres GSI, FZ Jülich and KIT. This new organisation bundles the forces of all Helmholtz centres tackling the most fundamental questions in physics – e.g. those about the structure of matter on very different scales and the origin of these structures. With its strong tradition of collaboration in particle and astroparticle physics and the wide-ranging activities of its theory department in these and other fields, the laboratory is optimally placed to benefit from this new structure and bring out its own advantages to the fullest.