Hard Probes 2024

Hard Probes, Second Edition in the App

Hard Probes is the conference where the heavy-ion community meets on perturbative probes of hot and dense QCD matter — jets, heavy flavour, electromagnetic probes — as studied in nucleus–nucleus, proton–nucleus and proton–proton collisions. The twelfth edition was held at Dejima Messe Nagasaki from 22 to 27 September 2024, a year after Hard Probes 2023 in Münster had run its programme on HEPCon. The community already had the app: Quark Matter 2023 was in it too, and Quark Matter 2025 would follow.

The programme: 308 talks from 272 speakers in 68 sessions, with up to four sessions in parallel, and 292 talk materials attached over the week.

A Conference That Opens With a School

Hard Probes begins on the Sunday with student lectures — in Nagasaki, on jets and high-p_T probes, on heavy flavour and quarkonia, and on the initial state and early-time dynamics — before the plenary programme opens on Monday. In the app the lecture day is simply the first day of the conference: the same timetable, the same session cards, the same offline cache, so students who arrived for the school were already carrying the week's programme when the plenaries started.

Four Parallel Sessions in the Afternoons

Monday to Wednesday were the densest days, with 14 to 20 sessions a day and four in parallel at peak across the venue's rooms. Attendees marked their talks into a personal schedule and let the app flag the overlaps; each session card carried its room, so moving between parallel streams was a glance rather than a search through a PDF.

Materials Where the Talks Are

The speakers' slides came through with the Indico timetable, and 292 materials were attached to their contributions in the app — readable on the phone during the session, on the bus back into town, and after the conference without hunting through the Indico tree.

Synced from Indico

The programme stayed in Indico. HEPCon read the timetable, speakers, rooms and materials from it and kept reading as talks moved during the week, so the local organizers maintained one programme, not two. On the attendee side everything was cached on first open; a change reached installed phones as a background update.

The Same App for the Same Community

Heavy-ion physics is a community that meets often — Quark Matter, Hard Probes, the regional meetings — and it is the same people each time. Because those conferences live in one HEPCon app, a speaker's page carries their talks across editions and a returning attendee opens an installed app rather than a store listing.