INPC2004, the 22nd International IUPAP Nuclear Physics Conference, was held in Goteborg , Sweden, from June 27 to July 3, 2004, organized by Chalmers University.
This conference was set up in a different way from the earlier conferences in this series. Pleanary sessions were scheduled in the morning from Monday to Wednesday and the whole day on Thursday and Friday. Six topical conferences were held Monday to Wednesday organized by the chairpersons with various series of invited talks. This was considered to be a great success by the delegates. Thursday afternoon the parallel session was open to the general public. The theme was applications of nuclear physics. Thursday also saw a youth conference organized for high school students. They were considered no different from other participants but had special lectures during the day and then participated in the last talk of the plenary session. All aspects of modern nuclear physics were included in the program: neutrino oscillations, nuclei and the standard model, subnucleon degrees of freedom with discussions around the pentaquark, radioactive beams, relativistic heavy-ion collisions and the hunt for the quark-gluon plasma, nuclear astrophysics, nuclear physics and society, and finally a longer session discussing expectations and plans for the future. The conference started with a talk by Aachim Richter that gave a dynamic and clear presentation of the field and was highly acclaimed.
The support from IUPAP was very much appreciated. There was also relatively strong financial support from different Swedish funding agencies. However, the problem encountered was with the disappointing number of participants. The projected budget was based on a participant number of 700 and with the loss of 200 participants and only 320 participants paying the full conference fee there was an accumulated deficit of 60,000 US dollars - which gave the organizers after the conference a financial nightmare since there were no funds to cover the deficit. The disappointing number of participants may be the result of the diminished general funding situation at the universities, the effects of September 11, the weak US dollar, and a proliferation of many smaller topical meetings organized too close to INPC2004. Still the days of the conference in Goteborg form a very enthralling memory to the conference organizers. Many letters of appreciation were received following the conference.