Future Perspectives of High Energy Experimental Physics and the Role of INFN

Abstract

The assessment of the future of HEP starts from what the field has achieved so far; the last fifty years have seen an exceptional number of discoveries whose focal point can be well represented by the Standard Model. In fact, instead of the many dozens of different elements that characterize the macroscopic world of the chemical elements, the HEP field has reached a remarkable degree of synthesis with the Standard Model, capable to describe the entire Universe with an handful of elementary particles and forces. Unfortunately we now know that this wonderful scheme describes only less than 5% of the known Universe, the remaining 95% being attributed to something that today generically we call “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter”. And is the understanding of the existence of this large area where the map still reports hic sunt leones and that we have to describe in terms of particles and interactions that justifies the strong belief that HEP has a very interesting future.