Theoretical Advanced Study Institute

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The Theoretical Advanced Study Institute or TASI is a four-week summer school in high-energy physics or astrophysics held yearly at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The school is meant primarily for advanced graduate students and consists of a series of pedagogical lectures on selected topics given by active researchers in the field. TASI is the most common summer school attended by high-energy physics graduate students in the United States.

The purpose of TASI is to introduce graduate students to cutting-edge topics that they may not have access to in their home institutions. TASI also gives young theoretical physicists a chance to meet and become friends with their fellow students, who will become their future peers.

Writeups of the TASI lectures are traditionally collected into a published volume each year, creating a valuable resource for students hoping to learn about current research topics in an accessible way. The writeups are typically also posted by the lecturers on arXiv.org, providing freely-accessible web-based sources on various physics topics that have been used as sources in some Wikipedia articles.

[edit] History

The first TASI was held in 1984 at the University of Michigan. Subsequent TASIs were held at Yale (1985), Santa Cruz (1986), Santa Fe (1987), and Brown (1988). Since 1989 TASI has been located in Boulder.