Particles and Nuclei International Conference 2008

The XVIII Particles and Nuclei International Conference (PANIC08) was held on November 9-14 2008 in Eilat , Israel . PANIC08 was attended by about 500 participants from 34 countries, including 140 young students and postdocs, 100 of whom were fully supported by the Conference (excluding foreign travel).

PANIC08 belongs to a series of triennial conferences that bring together Particle and Nuclear Physics, and recently also Astrophysics communities. The series started in 1964 with a small informal meeting organized at CERN by Torleif Ericson and the late Victor Weisskopf and Amos de-Shalit, and was followed by a truly international (II PANIC) meeting held in 1967 at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel.
A brief Welcome Session featured Itzhak Tserruya, PANIC08 Chair, and Harry (Zvi) Lipkin (Weizmann), whose career has embraced both Nuclear and Particle Physics. Another brief session was dedicated to the memory of the late Zeev Fraenkel (Weizmann) who contributed to the early stages of preparing for the Conference.

The scientific topics dealt with at PANIC08 were:

  • Fundamental symmetries and conservation laws (Haxton)
  • QCD, spin physics and chiral dynamics (Aoki, Weise, Hasch, Vogelsang, Son)
  • Hadronic and nuclear structure (Arrington, Piasetzky, Schwenk, Guidal, Caldwell )
  • Hot, dense and strange matter (Kharzeev, Steinberg, Van Leeuwen, Tamura)
  • Heavy flavor and exotics, CP violation and rare decays (Grossman, Olsen)
  • Neutrino physics and astrophysics (Gonzalez-Garcia, Waxman)
  • Nuclear and particle astrophysics and cosmology (Schatz, Dekel, Akerib)
  • The Standard Model, physics beyond, and search for new particles (Ellis)
  • Future facilities and detectors (Heuer-LHC, Nagamiya-JPARC)

These topics were covered by 25 plenary speakers marked above and by 45 invited speakers in parallel sessions, as well as in about 250 oral contributions selected by the parallel-session Conveners out of over 520 submissions. A poster session with about 100 posters was held in the afternoon of Tuesday November 12. Many topics attracted a wide audience belonging to the three seemingly different fields of Particle, Nuclear and Astrophysics. Prominent examples are:

  • Heavy Flavor exotic mesons discovered in recent years by the Belle and BaBar Collaborations;
  • the nature of the Neutrino, the masses of its three species and also neutrino mass differences from oscillation experiments, including a speculated connection to the recent evidence for modulations in the decay constant of electron-capture in hydrogen-like heavy ions at GSI, a topic that was discussed in a special brief session;
  • the PAMELA satellite borne experiment and its apparent relevance to Dark Matter searches.
Particular attention was given to the opportunities offered by the two major accelerator facilities due to begin operation during 2009, the LHC at CERN and JPARC in Japan . The Standard Model and physics beyond it were high on PANIC08 agenda, with ramifications to several disciplines, as emphasized in the Closing Lecture by John Ellis.

A Student Day was held on Sunday November 9th, with six tutorial lectures introducing key topics: by Wick Haxton (Seattle) on Fundamental Symmetries in Atoms and Nuclei, by Tetsuo Hatsuda (Tokyo) on QCD, by Alexander Milov (Weizmann) on Hot and Dense Matter, by Francis Halzen (Madison) on Astro-Particle Physics, by Boris Kayser (Fermilab) on Neutrino Physics and by Gerald Miller (Seattle) on Nucleon and Hadronic Structure.

The Student Day was followed in the evening by a Reception at the Dan Eilat Hotel for all the participants and accompanying persons attending PANIC08.
Three Young Scientist awards were granted, one commemorating the late Zeev Fraenkel (Weizmann) for the best oral presentation of a Hot and Dense Matter work was awarded to Chihiro Sasaki (Research Associate at TU, Munich), and two were awarded by Elsevier/Nuclear Physics A (Publisher of PANIC08 forthcoming Proceedings) to Doron Gazit (Research Associate at INT , Seattle) for the best oral presentation and to Georgia Karagiorgi (graduate student at MIT) for the best poster presentation. Eligible candidates had to be younger than 35 years old at the close of 2008. The selection of awardees was processed by a special international ad-hoc committee.
General information about the Conference including the complete scientific program as well as copy of all the talks presented can be found on the Conference website: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/conferences/panic08/ or directly at: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/MaKaC/ . The Conference Proceedings will be published by Elsevier.
Eilat, on the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba of the Red Sea , offers spectacular outdoor marine, desert and mountain activities which added a special dimension to the Conference. A related public Science Lecture on the Ecology of the Gulf of Aqaba was delivered on Tuesday evening by Amatzia Genin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Inter-University Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat. The Conference attendees were offered the opportunity to enjoy Eilat and its surroundings during the half day excursions organized in the afternoon of Wednesday November 12. The Conference Banquet was held on Thursday evening in the Timna National Park which records ample evidence for a creative Egyptian civilization that reached its peak during the 14th-12th centuries BC.
The Conference was followed by three one-day satellite meetings at the three host institutions: the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot (Hot and Dense Matter), Tel Aviv University (Study of Fundamental Interactions with Traps) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Advances in Strangeness Nuclear Physics).
PANIC08 was hosted by the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv University . It was sponsored by the Israel Science Foundation, by the following international laboratories: BNL , IN2P3/ CNRS , DESY, FNAL, GSI, JPARC, LANL, ORNL, SLAC, TJNAF, TRIUMF, as well as by IUPAP and Elsevier.
The International Advisory Committee of PANIC met during the Conference and decided that the next PANIC meeting will be held in the Summer of 2011 at MIT, Cambridge , MA , USA .

Itzhak Tserruya

Chair, PANIC08