SPIN2008

The 18th International Spin Physics Symposium (SPIN2008) was held at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA from October 6 - 11, 2008. The Symposium was officially supported by IUPAP. There were 282 registered attendees from 27 different countries.

This was the 5th Symposium which covered the fields of both Nuclear and High Energy Spin Physics, continuing from the merger of two conference series at SPIN2000 in Osaka, Japan. The following topics were discussed:

  1. Fundamental Symmetries and Spin beyond the Standard Model
  2. Spin Structure of the Nucleons - Longitudinal Spin.
  3. Spin Structure of the Nucleons - Transverse Spin
  4. Spin Structure of the Nucleons - Combined Spin
  5. GPDs and Form Factors
  6. Soft Hadronic Interactions
  7. Spin of Nuclei and Rare Isotopes
  8. Acceleration Storage and Polarimitry of Polarized Beams
  9. Polarized Sources and Targets
  10. Applications of Spin, Associated Technologies and Future Facilities

There was no Poster Session and all legitimate submissions were presented orally. A special evening session was held in which Laboratory Directors (or their surrogates) from around the world presented their vision for spin related activities at their laboratories. The Plenary Session talks presented overviews of the topics mentioned above, besides a more popular one by Stuart Wolf of the University of Virginia on Spintronics . In total there were 195 parallel talks and 37 Plenary talks, including the Introductions and Conclusions. Finally, tributes were paid to Oliver Overseth and Jacques Arvieux who had died since SPIN2006.

For this Symposium, the tradition of holding a separate polarized electron source workshop a few days before the main symposium was revived. At SPIN2006 electron sources were covered in a parallel session. PESP2008 was held at the Jefferson Laboratory from October 1 - 4, 2008 and organized by Matt Poelker of Jefferson Lab.

The Proceedings of the Symposium will be published by the American Institute of Physics and will include the talks from PESP2008.

An article on the Symposium will be published in the June edition of the CERN COURIER.