This workshop is designed to complement graduate education, especially in the African countries, and to provide a direct contact to field's leaders in selected research areas, heading towards deep impact research activities. While open to any interested young researchers, it is primarily intended to serve African young academic community. Thus MSc- and PhD-students and Post-Docs (in an early stage of career) from the Southern countries are therefore particularly encouraged to apply.

The LHC is specifically devoted to probe the characterize of the hadronization processes, the properties of the quark-gluon plasma and the origin of the weak scale, so the evolution of the early universe and searches for the various types of matter/radiation/energy filling the background geometry and LHC physics appears to be closely related. Recently, a spectacular progress in astrophysical observations is achieved. It points towards a current era acceleration of our Universe, something that could be explained either by a non-zero cosmological constant in a Friedman-Robertson-Walker-Einstein Universe, or in general by a non-zero dark energy component, which could even be relaxing to zero supporting the geometric interpretation of the acceleration of the Universe today. The accelerating expanding universe has been awarded by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.

The possible constraints on particle physics models, obtained by means of combining the LHC and RHIC with astrophysical data will be reviewed. Issues such as super-symmetric dark matter/energy constraints at LHC, the standard Cosmological-Constant-Cold-Dark-Matter model, superstring-inspired ones and non-equilibrium relaxation dark energy models, the capability of LHC, RHIC, etc. measurements in asserting whether super-symmetric matter constitutes part, or all, of the astrophysical dark matter and prospects for improving the constraints in future precision facilities, such as the International Linear Collider will be discussed. Ultra high energy cosmic rays and their acceleration mechanisms and the associated new physics shall be reviewed. The properties of QGP and latest lattice QCD simulations shall be presented.