AUSTRALASIA – The 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, 4–11 July, was front page news as leading particle physicists confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson, or ‘God particle’, gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together.
Retired Edinburgh University Professor Peter Higgs was at CERN earlier this week in Switzerland when the team from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced they had found a new particle “consistent” with the Higgs boson.
Director General of CERN, Professor Rolf Heuer, says: “ICHEP is the most important conference in the particle physics calendar, and it’s great that it’s happening in Australia for the first time, a sign of that country’s growing stature in the field.”
The ground-breaking Higgs Boson discovery announcement at the venue helped shed positive light not only on the make up of the Universe, but on the city’s flourishing business events industry.
ICHEP has brought 800 delegates to the city for an eight-day period and is expected to generate an estimated AU$8m (US$8.21m) in economic impact for the state of Victoria. The conference is the largest scientific gathering in the high energy physics community and was won after an intensive bidding process, facilitated by Melbourne Convention and Visitors Bureau (MCVB), dating back to2005.
Chief Executive Officer of the MCVB, Karen Bolinger, said MCVB partnered with the University of Melbourne to bid for the 2012 Conference, with Professor Geoffrey Taylor, past Head of the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne as the representative local host.
“After a number of years of hard work in preparing Melbourne’s bid to bring the event to Victoria, Melbourne was announced as the successful bid city, fending off strong competition from Manchester, at the Philadelphia conference in 2008,” she said.
Bolinger said that, as Australia’s knowledge, research and innovation capital, Melbourne was the obvious choice for hosting this event.
“Over the next two and a half years, Melbourne will host seven of the world’s largest and most prestigious conferences including the World Diabetes Congress in 2013 and the World Congress of Cardiology and the International AIDS Conference in 2014.”
Bolinger noted there was still limited awareness of the beyond tourism benefits produced as a result of business events.
Photo credit: CERN
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