Melbourne shared in the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle in 2012, and the city is expected to reap millions of dollars in economic benefits brought by the conference at which this discovery was announced.

The announcement that a suspect matching the elusive subatomic particle’s description had been found came at the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics, held at the Melbourne Convention Centre in July, in a joint announcement with CERN in Switzerland.

The conference brought more than 800 delegates to the city over an eight-day period and the Melbourne Convention + Visitors Bureau (MCVB) expects it to generate $8 million in economic impact for Victoria.

MCVB partnered with the University of Melbourne to bid for the 2012 conference, with the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP), Prof Geoffrey Taylor, as the local host.

Researchers at the ARC Centre are actively involved with CERN research.  The Centre brings together particle physicists based at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and Monash University.

MCVB CEO Karen Bolinger says Melbourne was the obvious choice for hosting the conference because the city is the knowledge, research and innovation capital of Australia.

“Over the next two and a half years, Melbourne will host seven of the world’s largest and most prestigious conferences including the World Diabetes Congress in 2013 and the World Congress of Cardiology and the International AIDS Conference in 2014, all of which were secured by the MCVB,” she says.

Photo: The Melbourne Convention Centre was the host of the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics, where the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle was announced in 2012

Credit: MCVB

Melbourne Convention + Visitors Bureau (MCVB), Rebecca Elliott, Tel: +61 3 9693 3317, Rebecca.elliott@mcvb.com.au, www.mcvb.com.au