The sorting categories guide people who are submitting abstracts. For example, without a dark energy category, no one sent us abstracts for that physics, but sent them to DAP instead.

The categories then help the sorters identify topics and know roughly how many sessions of what type will occur. There is no sorting software that matches categories to the final sessions (except an overall number of sessions) The sorters have to do it by hand. Since there will be 4 sorters, the categories will be divided between them to lighten the load - another reason it is good to have explicit categories. Each of the program committee members will also be assigned in groups of 3-4 people by subfield to help the sorter or fill in gaps when we don’t have a sorter in that subfield. See the list below to find the categories assigned to you.

Looking through the abstracts as they are coming in allows each small group to make suggestions ahead of time to the sorter as to how they can be turned into interesting sessions. However, during the actual sorting meeting at APS – there is no time to provide feedback. So the sorters will use their own judgement to create the sessions.

Finally - there should be symposia and focus sessions already defined. Many will have an invited talk (identified), but then a bunch of parallel talks. Those talks come from the abstracts, so we have to be ready to choose those from the categories and put them into special sessions.

1. Issue: It took us long to sort our abstracts, because we spent time to sort out joint mini-symposia first. Other divisions got to the white board before we did, took most of Saturday and Sunday slots. After some semi-tense negotiation, we got some Saturday and Sunday slots, but we did not get a “fair share” of Saturday.
2. Suggestions for future: In ADVANCE of the sorting meeting, the program committee sorters agree on which time slots on Sat/Sun/Mon/Tue would be best for DPF sessions and claim them to get our fair share. Or APS allocates slots for each day for each division, based on the number of abstracts.

The suggested categories below for the 2019 sorting process.

1. Advanced Computational and Analysis Techniques
2. Accelerators and beams
3. Instrumentation and Detector R&D
4. Dark Matter
5. Axion and Hidden Sector Searches
6. Neutrino oscillations
7. Sterile neutrino searches
8. Neutrino cross-sections
9. Particle Astrophysics (Astrophysical Neutrinos is now inside Particle Astrophysics)
10. Inflation/Cosmic Expansion/Dark Energy
11. Field theory and new theoretical developments
12. Supersymmetry: Searches and Models
13. Beyond Standard Model Physics (Not including SUSY)
14. Physics of the Higgs boson
15. Electroweak Physics
16. Weak decays of heavy quarks
17. Hadron spectroscopy and non-perturbative QCD
18. QCD and Quark Matter
19. Charged Lepton Properties

Notes extracted from Feb 5, 2018 by Dmitri Action Items added in italics

a) ~230 total, 2 people had to sort in one day. Identify 4 people by September

b) quite a few abstracts came from other divisions as they matched DPF categories better; Better categories - help us draft them below.

c) as many decisions have to be taken “on the spot” it helps if between sorters we have individuals covering all DPF related areas (DNP has ~5-6 sorters for this reason);

d) some of the sorting categories had very few abstracts, like ~3 for the top quark studies;

e) typical APS parallel session has 9 talks, while between 6 and 10 is acceptable;

f) we can have access to abstracts as they come in (or after formal submission ends?), so we can provide feedback to the sorters in advance. We had access this year and divided people into groups to look at those abstracts, but very few did that. We cannot do it earlier, because it is timed to abstract submission. If we have 4 sorters from a range of disciplines, we can match the support group to the sorter expertise and the sorter can call a short teleconference ahead of time.

1. Low-background techniques (with DNP) (Prisca - we should be part of this - DNP did it on its own this year)
2. Symmetries (with GPM) (Prisca - I was thinking CPT violation exp and theory) [Prisca Cushman]
3. CMB (with DAP) (Prisca)
4. Dark Matter Complementarity - indirect, direct, accelerator, gravity [Jodi Cooley] (with DAP)
5. Light Dark Matter [Bertrand Echenard]
6. Axion-like particles (with GPMFC)
7. Dark Matter - the gravitational toolkit (large-scale dynamics, gravitational lensing, etc.)
8. Neutron Stars: the multimessenger view [Tom Diehl]
9. Applications of Quantum Detectors: ADMX, MAGIS etc. [Rusack]