From: sawyer@utahep.uta.edu (Lee Sawyer)
Subject: Impressions of the ICHEP92 in Dallas
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Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 18:23:00 GMT
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    Some impressions of the International Conference on High Energy Physics,
held in Dallas the last few days, have already been posted. I concur that the
tau branching ratio or "1prong" problem seems to be slowly dying with better
results, particularly from CLEO II. ChangKee Jung from Stony Brook pointed
out that, using just the tau lifetime from 1prong decays, there really isn't
a discrepancy (although of course the error bars are bigger).

    For me, the most impressive results were from the HERA ep collider,
now operating under the city of Hamburg. Both the H1 and ZEUS detectors
have recorded deep inelastic scattering events, the machine seems to be
running near design (although the proton beam was not up to the nominal 820 Gev
at will run at). In the next few months some really nice results are going to be
coming from this collider, although for the conference they had only a few dozen
events based on about one month of running. Anyone at DESY want to keep the
rest of us uptodate ?

    I can also speak a bit more coherently on future colliders. There are
several designs on the board  tau/charm, b, and phi factories, mostly e+e
machines but with at least one proposal for an asymmetric proton collider
as a b factory. However only one of these, the phi factory at Frascati, is
actually under construction. But on the other hand, conferees were reminded that
there already is a b factory : CESR, which has steadily increased in luminosity
over the last five years; and a tau/charm/b factory : LEP, which is now getting
around 45k Z0 events per week. Machine development for the Next Linear Collider
is proceeding, with various accelerator structure prototypes being tested in the
next year (the "partner beam" test at DESY(?) and the Final Focus Test Beam at
SLAC).

    Peskin gave a good talk on the two roads to SU(3)xSU(2)XU(1) unification :
Weak interactions with elementary scalars (Supersymmetry) or strong interactions
with dynamical sysmmetry breaking (Technicolor). Weinberg in his conference 
summary placed his bets on Supersymmetry.

    Rubbia spoke on LHC, and European HEP in general; Schwitters talked about
SSC. Most infuriating moment : Rubbia's insistenence on referring to Fermilab
as "Flab". Great, Carlo, just keep thinking that...and saying that LHC will turn
on in 1999 when you don't have working magnets and none of the experiments have
even drawn up technical designs. I think smoke is still coming out of my ears...

    All in all a great conference. The upshot of it all is (as always) that the 
Standard Model is in great shape. But we are at a point, with HERA going down
to the nonpertubative region and the Tevatron producing good data for two
experiments, where things could well start to get interesting...

       ================
         Dr. Lee Sawyer

         Dept of Physics
         Univ. of Texas
               at Arlington