Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP)

Work for the coming year is a logical continuation of the efforts of the past year. Some special highlights of this past year which are discusses in more detail in this report are: (1) The move onto beamline and start of ZEUS data taking. (2) The completion of the SDC technical proposal including a detailed long-term plan for construction. (3) Continuing publication of very detailed physics results from ALEPH concerning τ and b physics, and a precision measurement of electroweak and QCD parameters. (4) Completion of very successful data taking for E-791 at Fermilab, with nearly twice as many events recorded as initially proposed. (5) First measurement of beam polarization at the SLC. These efforts have led to about 15 physics publications this past year centered mainly on topics related to QCD, couplings of flavors to the Z degrees, and heavy flavor decays. Taken as a whole, the results in jets from LEP, the ratio of hadronic to leptonic decays of the τ the leptonic branching fraction of the J/ψ, and the charmonium mass spectrum provide a very consistent set of values of αs at a variety of scales. In particular, they show the running of αs by a factor of about three from mr to mz. Results from LEP also provide evidence of the triple gluon vertex. Similarly, the measurement of the b bar b fraction of Z degrees decays, from the MARK II as well as LEP, provide increasingly better measurements of the Z degree coupling to b quarks. Combined with earlier precision measurements of the Z degrees mass, width, and leptonic branching fractions, the Z degrees decays continue to provide a very precise verification of the Standard Model