Dear colleague

This letter is the first announcement of the fourteenth workshop entitled

"What Comes Beyond the Standard Models?"

which will take place at Bled from 11th of July (arrival day, afternoon) to 21th of July 2011 (departure day, morning).

Program

Our workshop is organized for the purpose of answering some of the open questions in the Standard model of the electroweak and colour interactions, like:

o 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?

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

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

o Where does the weak scale come from?

o Why do only left-handed fermions carry the weak charge

o What is the origin of Higgs fields? Where do(es) the  mass(es) of scalar fields originate?

o What is the origin of families and their masses?

o Can new stable families be responsible for the dark matter?

o Shall we observe more than three families on the LHC?

o Does the supersymmetry have a chance to be seen at the LHC?

o Can all known elementary particles be understood as different states of only one particle, with a unique internal space of only two kinds of a spin?

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

o What is the composition of our universe and which possible candidates for dark matter are allowed by available data?

o Where does the dark energy originate?

o What is the role of symmetries (discrete, continous, global and gauge) in Nature?

o What is the origin of fermion-antifermion asymmetry

o What is the origin of fields which caused inflation?

o How do phase transitions determine properties of fermions and bosons?

o What new can bring the imaginary part of a Lagrangean?

o What is the role of noncommutativity in field theories?

o Renormalizability of QFT's in more than four dimensions

About our workshops

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 thirteen years we have organized thirteen workshops entitled ``What Comes Beyond the Standard Models?" 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 eleven 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 conference  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 roceedings can all be found on arxiv. The proceedings from 2010 is at  arXiv.org/abs/1012.0224 

Web conferences using VIA system are planned during the Workshop, as was the case for the previous three years.  We expect several contributions at distance with the use of VIA system. The records of previous VIA discussions and presentations at Bled Workshops are available at the following URL: http://viavca.in2p3.fr/conferences.html

About location

Bled is a nice town by the lake of the same name, surrounded by mountains, with many comfortable hotels. Home page of Bled, containing information for visitors, is available at http://www.bled.si in several languages.

The Physical Society together with the Mathematical Society owns a house, whose owner was our well known mathematician Josip Plemelj. This house can accept 16 people in 8 rooms. The street location of the house (Villa) is Presernova cesta 39, Bled. It also has a lecture room for around 20 people.

Cost

We are trying to keep the costs low. The Conference fee will be 500 EUR for the week (or 50 EUR per day) and it will cover breakfast, coffee, snacks and dinner for 10 days and 10 nights, as well as the Proceedings.

In addition, the price of ten days accommodation in Villa Plemelj is 200 EUR (sharing a double bedroom) or 400 EUR (for single occupancy) and it is paid separately from the Conference fee.  The accommodation in Villa Plemelj has to be paid  for the whole period, unless we find a replacement. 
If one prefers a nearby hotel, we can make the arrangements and one pays the hotel bill there. However, we strongly encourage the choice of Villa Plemelj (if possible sharing a room),  so that we can all stay together.

Invitation

Please let us know, if you need a letter of invitation from the organizing committee either for your institute/university or for a visa application.

Excursion:

We recommend that you bring appropriate shoes and parkas for trekking and mountaineering.

Sponsors

We have asked 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

You may send a one page contribution to the workshop.

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 (although the talks usually, because of many questions and interruptions, last pretty longer). In the rest of the workshop we shall discuss the open problems.