COMS

Western Australia is an ideal site for the SKA with its wide expanses of sparsely populated territory and very low levels of man-made interference. Combining this site with SKA antennas in New Zealand gives 6000-km baselines and milliarcsecond resolution at cm wavelengths. The SKA provides wonderful opportunities not only for advancement of science but also for technological development and innovation.

The primary aim of this SKANZ 2012 conference is to foster interaction and collaboration between Australian and New Zealand scientists and engineers, building on the successful SKANZ 2010 meeting, and thereby helping to realise the exciting potential of the SKA. I hope you can join us!"

While the emphasis will be on topics directly related to positrons in physics and in astronomy, the scope of the workshop will also include other forms of antimatter both in the laboratory and in space. Review talks on a variety of antimatter topics will set the context and summarize the current state of the art in the different fields, while more specialized presentations will report on the latest developments. The objectives of the workshop are to identify the specific issues to be tackled next in each domain and to encourage future progress through interactions between the different research areas within and beyond positron science.

Since then, impressive new results in the calculation of quantum scattering amplitudes in gauge theory and gravity have been obtained thanks to new twistor-string inspired methods. This progress has also been made possible because of the fruitful exchange of ideas between three previously disconnected communities of researchers: string theorists, phenomenologists and mathematicians with interests in Penrose's twistor theory. The subject continues to expand rapidly, with new approaches and connections appearing at a dramatic pace including holography, Wilson loops, integrability, Grassmannians and momentum twistors.

The purpose of the mini-workshop will be to provide the opportunity for researchers working in this wide-ranging and rapidly evolving area to meet. The scientific goals of the workshop will be to review recent progress, stimulate interaction and collaboration among participants, and inspire further outstanding developments in the field.

The series Hadron Physics, in activity since 1988, has the format of an advanced school and has the objective to introduce, in a series of pedagogical lectures, new lines of research in Strong Interaction Physics, mainly concerned with QCD. It envisages also to estimulate collaborations in international level.

Our COST Action Black Holes in a Violent Universe has the main goal to further the understanding of the general phenomenon of Black Holes by bringing together scientists from all Black Hole mass-ranges and all over Europe.

Every Black Hole scientist is welcome (all Black Hole masses, theory or observation, early Universe or neighbourhood, astronomy or fundamental physics) !

One session will be devoted to Quantumgravity and will be jointly organized by the COST Actions MP1006 (Fundamental Problems in Quantum Physics) and our Action MP0905 bringing the small scales, and the large Black Hole masses together!

The conference will consist of plenary sessions for invited in depth oral presentations (review talks and talks on specific specialised topics), and contributed papers, in the form of relatively short oral papers. We will aim to achieve a balance between review talks and shorter contributions, special emphasis being placed on active participation by younger researchers and post-docs. Parallel sessions are foreseen, and are being organised as the need arises.

The conference covers a broad range of topics with a particular emphasis on spectral line shape studies including line shapes of atomic and molecular transitions in neutral gaseous mixtures, high and low temperature plasmas, clusters and helium droplets, spectroscopy of stellar atmospheres and interstellar media, cold atoms and molecules, collision-induced spectra, processes in laser fields and innovative techniques of line shape applications for diagnostic purposes.

The Conference includes invited lectures, contributed talks, poster presentations, and round table discussions. Sessions is held in the historical building of St.Petersburg State University in the city centre.

The Thirteenth International Solar Wind Conference will be organized by the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Center of Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) and the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, under the direction of Dr's Gary P Zank and Jim Spann. The meeting itself will take place at the Sheraton Keauhou Bay on the Big Island, Hawaii, USA, from 17 to 22 June 2012. The conference will conform to the traditional solar wind themes, addressing the current state of knowledge in the relevant fields of solar and heliospheric physics. In particular, the conference will address: 1) Physics of the corona, origin and acceleration of the solar wind, and relevant observations of the Sun. 2) Dynamical behavior of the interplanetary medium throughout the heliosphere, including large and small scale structures, the evolution of disturbances, dissipative processes, turbulence, and solar energetic particles. 3) Interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar medium and the heliospheric boundaries, and cosmic rays. 4) Interaction of the solar wind with solar system objects and dusty environments, including the Earth's magnetosphere, planets, and comets. 5) Status and prospects of current and future solar wind and heliospheric missions, including new advances in instrumentation. The program will follow a largely traditional format in that it will be composed of invited lectures and contributed talks and posters.

In advance of that historic flyby, the New Horizons mission is sponsoring a scientific meeting to review knowledge of the Pluto System, to inform the planetary science community about the flyby and collaboration/DAP funding opportunities, to discuss and begin to prepare groundbased and spacebased observing proposals, and to provide a venue for scientific predictions.