First Workshop on Grand Unification (eBook)

This workshop held at the New England Center provided a timely opportunity for over 100 participants to gather in a unique environment and discuss the present status of the unification of strong and electroweak forces. One reason for the timeliness was perhaps that experiments of the seventies had already lent confirmation to the separate theories of strong and of electroweak forces, so that for the eighties it now seems especially compelling to attempt the grand unification of these two forces. Also, the planned experiments to search for proton decay and the new experiments which are suggestive, though not yet conclusive, of non-zero neutrino rest masses add further stimulus to the theory. Thus, the workshop provided an ideal forum for exchange of ideas amongst active physicists. The presentations at the workshop covered the present status of both theory and experiment with a strong interplay. Also, there were presentations from the discipline of astrophysics which is becoming very intertwined with that of high-energy physics especially when in the latter one is addressing energies and temperatures that were extant only in the first nanosecond of the universe. On experiment, we heard a comprehensive coverage of the four United States proton decay experiments. The Brookhaven-Irvine-Michigan experiment in the Morton Salt Mine at Fairport Harbor, Ohio was discussed by LARRY SULAK, while DAVID WINN talked on the Harvard-Purdue-Wisconsin effort in the Silver King Mine, Utah. MARVIN MARSHAK and RICHARD STEINBERG described respectively the Soudan Mine, Minnesot~ and the Homestake Mine, South Dakot~experiments.