It will take place on the 19th, 20th and the 21st of September, at largo Enrico Fermi 5, in Arcetri, Firenze, the inaugural conference that marks the official opening of the Galileo Galilei Institute (Ggi), the first European institute devoted to the theoretical particle physics.

The National Institute for Nuclear Physics (Infn) and the University of Florence have promoted the Galileo Galiei Institute with the purpose of organize and host small-size advanced workshops in theoretical particle physics in its broadest sense.
The Institute is located on the historic hill of Arcetri, in a building owned by the University of Florence, near the house where Galileo spent periods of his life and where he died. The fundamental aim of these workshops will be to foster the confrontation of ideas among participants and encourage collaborations to influence the development of theoretical physics. It is expected that the Institute will have also a prime role in training young researchers. Various institutes for theoretical physics already work along similar lines, hosting distinguished researchers from all over the world for extended periods. The new institution of Arcetri, nevertheless, bears to fill the lack in Europe of an institution focused on the physics of fundamental interactions.
Each workshop, with a typical duration of 2-3 months, will be devoted to a specific topic at the forefront of current research and will host about 20 participants to be selected within the international community, among those most active in this field.

The activity of the institute will be organized jointly by a scientific and an advisory committee. A “launching committee”, directed by Gabriele Veneziano (senior staff member at Cern and professor at the “Collège de France” in Paris) has been appointed with the task of coordinate the relationships between the different structures in the first step of running. The appointed members of the launching committee are: David Gross (director of “Kavli” Institute for the theoretical physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara and Nobel Prize in 2004), Giuseppe Marchesini (professor of theoretical physics at the University of Milano-Bicocca), Alfred Mueller (professor of theoretical particle physics at the University of Columbia), Giorgio Parisi (professor of quantum theories at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”).

The scientific program plans the beginning of the workshops in the spring of 2006. The first one, titled “New directions beyond the standard model in field and string theory”, will take place during the months of May and June and will treat topics concerning the beginning of the experimental program of the Lhc collider at Cern, in Geneva, planned in 2007. The second workshop will take place from September to November 2006 and it will be devoted to the new frontiers in astroparticle physics and cosmology.