This workshop will explore the physics opportunities of a 100 TeV proton-proton collider. Both the European Strategy for Particle Physics and the Snowmass 2013 study in the US emphasized that it is important to begin looking beyond the LHC program to proton colliders at higher energies. Significant effort has been devoted to studies at LHC accessible energies, but relatively few studies have been performed well beyond 14 TeV. Our goal is to provide a forum to report and discuss first results on physics processes in this higher energy regime. We view this workshop as part of a global program to understand what physics can be done at a proton collider with energy much higher than that of the LHC.
First, we will discuss how the physics environment at 100 TeV differs from that at 14 TeV. What parton distributions should be used? How will we deal with the large number of jets in signal, hard background, and even minimum-bias events? Electroweak emissions and multiple top quark production are expected to be found in a large fraction of the highest energy events; how does this influence our methods of analysis? Do we need detectors that are substantially different from the LHC detectors? We have invited experts to give first answers to these questions.
Second, we will discuss the implications of 100 TeV experiments for models of new physics. In many models, the first new particles will be discovered at the LHC. Then collisions at 100 TeV open the study of heavier species and even, in the case of composite Higgs and Randall-Sundrum models, access to the underlying strong dynamics. It is also important to clarify the role of 100 TeV experiments if no new states are discovered at the LHC. Experiments at 100 TeV can be sensitive to heavy WIMP dark matter. Can we argue that such a collider can search definitively for WIMPs within well-defined scenarios?
Finally, we will critically address the question, is 100 TeV enough? We hope you will join us to begin a discussion of these issues which are clearly central to long-term planning for the field of particle physics.