With the forthcoming start of the LHC, particle physics has entered a new regime, which should lead us to give an answer to questions like the origin of EW symmetry breaking, and the existence of supersymmetry.

Being the LHC a hadron collider machine, all the interesting high-pt new reactions are essentially initiated by QCD hard scattering. To claim for a new physics signal, a good control over known Standard Model (SM) processes is thus necessary.

The present status of QCD and, more generally, SM predictions for hard scattering reactions is essentially limited to radiative corrections at the next-to-leading order (NLO) in perturbation theory. Next-to-next-to leading order (NNLO) results are known only for a limited number of processes and observables and the predictions for many important reactions (with more than five legs) are still limited to LO.

Nonetheless, over the last two years great progress has been acheived in the field. We are getting new significant analytic control over the matrix elements as a result of the twistor techniques initiated by Witten in December 2003. A number of other promising automated analytic and numerical methods have also been suggested. Fully automated NLO calculations are expected to become feasible for processes with up to six legs, and new techniques have also emerged in NNLO calculations which follow those developed at NLO.

This workshop will mainly focus on the development of new, fully automated, methods for NLO computations of multi-leg processes in the Standard Model and its viable extensions. The progress is at an impressive speed, on both the analytical and numerical sides. The field is strongly driven. We see a lot of work and lot of enthusiasm. We hope that our meeting in Zurich will help to keep the spirit high.

If it is desired we may continue with the HP² conference in one or two years of cycles.
Suggestion:
2007(8) (Buenos-Aires)
2008(10) (Florence).