PROCEEDINGS OF THE 1983 DPF WORKSHOP ON COLLIDER DETECTORS: PRESENT CAPABILITIES AND FUTURE POSSIBILITIES, FEB. 28 - MARCH 4, 1983.

It is useful before beginning our work here to restate briefly the purpose of this workshop in the light of the present circumstances of elementary particle physics in the U.S. The goal of our field is easily stated in a general way: it is to reach higher center of mass energies and higher luminosities while employing more sensitive and more versatile event detectors, all in order to probe more deeply into the physics of elementary particles. The obstacles to achieving this goal are equally apparent. Escalating costs of construction and operation of our facilities limit alternatives and force us to make hard choices among those alternatives. The necessity to be highly selective in the choice of facilities, in conjunction with the need for increased manpower concentrations to build accelerators and mount experiments, leads to complex social problems within the science. As the frontier is removed ever further, serious technical difficulties and limitations arise. Finally, competition, much of which is usually healthy, now manifests itself with greater intensity on a regional basis within our country and also on an international scale. In the far ({ge}20 yr) future, collaboration on physics facilities by two or more of the major economic entities of the world will possibly be forthcoming. In the near future, we are left to bypass or overcome these obstacles on a regional scale as best we can. The choices we face are in part indicated in the list of planned and contemplated accelerators shown in Table I. The facilities indicated with an asterisk pose immediate questions: (1) Do we need them all and what should be their precise properties? (2) How are the ones we choose to be realized? (3) What is the nature of the detectors to exploit those facilities? (4) How do we respond to the challenge of higher luminosity as well as higher energy in those colliders? The decision-making process in this country and elsewhere depends on the answers to these technical questions. Those relating to the accelerators have been and continue to be addressed in many workshops and studies. For example, a workshop organized by M. Tigner will begin to study the means of achieving a very high energy (10 TeV x 10 TeV) hadron collider; this is scheduled at the end of March at Cornell University. If it seems desirable, continuity in the form of subsequent workshops on technical questions relating to accelerator facilities might be provided by the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society, as it is doing here for collider detectors. The workshop we are about to begin is intended to address questions (3) and (4) above. It is an attempt to look at those questions from a broad point of view by assembling a wide spectrum of experts from universities and national and international laboratories. It is planned to make the proceedings of the workshop available to the 1983 Woods Hole Sub-Panel of HEPAP which is charged with the responsibility for recommendations concerning the choices that face the U.S. program. This is the main reason that we are meeting at the present time. In this connection, it is worth emphasizing that the DPF is an organization of roughly 3000 physicists from universities and national laboratories. It is an independent organization not affiliated with any laboratory or government agency. Most important, it is not a decision-making body or a lobbying group. Its aim is to provide neutral arenas for scholarly discussion of the salient issues of our area of science, e.g., the DPF Summer Study on Particle Physics and Facilities in Snowmass, Colorado, in the summer of 1982. For this reason it concentrates on technical questions such as those of this Workshop