The first announcement of the eleventh workshop organized by
Norma Mankoč Borštnik, Colin Froggatt and Holger Bech Nielsen

Dear colleague

This letter is the first announcement of the eleventh workshop entitled

"What Comes Beyond the Standard Model?"

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which will take place at Bled from 15th of July (arrival day, afternoon) to 25th of July 2008 (departure day, morning).

Our workshop is organized for the purpose of answering some of the open questions in the electroweak Standard Model like:

1. Why has Nature made a choice of four (noticeable) dimensions while all the others, if existing, are hidden? And what are the properties of space-time in the hidden dimensions?

2. How could Nature make the decision about the breaking of symmetries down to the noticeable ones, coming from some higher dimension d?

3. Why is the metric of space-time Minkowskian and how is the choice of metric connected with the evolution of our universe(s)?

4. Where does the observed asymmetry between matter and antimatter originate from?

5. Why do massless fields exist at all? Where does the weak scale come from?

6. Why do only left-handed fermions carry the weak charge? Why does the weak charge break parity?

7. What is the origin of Higgs fields? Where does the Higgs mass come from?

8. Where does the small hierarchy come from? (Or why are some Yukawa couplings so small and where do they come from?)

9. Do Majorana-like particles exist?

10. Where do the generations come from?

11. Can all known elementary particles be understood as different states of only one particle, with a unique internal space of spins and charges?

12. How can all gauge fields (including gravity) be unified and quantized?

13. Why do we have more matter than antimatter in our universe?

14. What is our universe made out of (besides the baryonic matter)?

15. What is the role of symmetries in Nature?

16. What is the origin of the field which caused inflation?



The aim of the workshop is to bring together physicists, who are trying to find the answers to some of these and other open questions from the field of the elementary particles and cosmology and who would enjoy to actively discuss the above questions in a small group.

In the last ten years we organized nine workshops entitled ``What Comes Beyond the Standard Model?" They took place annually in July since 1998. Each year we spent ten days, trying to answer these questions in a very pleasant and relaxing atmosphere. We have published seven volumes of Proceedings to these workshops (one in 1999, and then one volume every year since 2001). In the year 2003 we have also organized, in addition and with the help of EURESCO, the first conference in a conference series "What comes beyond the Standard models?" titled "Euroconference on symmetries beyond the Standard models" from 12. - 17. of July 2003 in Portoroz, Slovenia. Proceedings volume published in 2003 contains write-ups of the talks at this conference.

The Physical Society together with the Mathematical Society owns a house, whose owner was the well known mathematician Josip Plemelj (access map is available here). This house can accept 16 people in 8 rooms. It also has a lecture room for around 20 people.

Bled is a nice town by the lake of the same name, surrounded by mountains, with many comfortable hotels.

The workshop is organized by the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Department of Physics. We have asked the European Physical Society and the Slovenian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology to sponsor this workshop. The workshop is sponsored by the Slovenian National Committee for Physics, DMFA, Department of Physics, FMP, University of Ljubljana.

One page contribution


We kindly ask you to send a one page contribution to the workshop until the end of May 2008.

Suggestions of discussions


We also ask you to write in a few sentences the suggestions for the open problems, which you are prepared to lead the discussions for, or you suggest the discussions about.

Presentations


It is planned that in the first two or three days everybody will present her or his work in a one hour talk. In the rest of the workshop we shall discuss the open problems.