Vol. 30 No. 5
September-October 2008

Photodynamics

by Jesús Rubayo-Soneira

The Fifth International Meeting on Photodynamics was held in Havana, 4–8 February 2008. The central theme was the description, both from the experimental and the theoretical point of view, of the physical and chemical processes related to environmental and biological systems. Approximately 110 scientists from 18 countries attended. The meeting featured 37 plenary lectures and 53 poster presentations.

Prior to the conference, a school was held from 30 January to 2 February 2008 focused on the new generation of young researchers, from Cuba and Latin American countries and the rest of the world. Fifty students attended the lectures given by professors with excellence in both teaching and research, who taught short courses on the following topics:

• Non-Adiabatic Transitions in Electronically Excited Molecules (Sergy Yu. Grebenshchikov)
• Structure, Dynamics, and Spectroscopy of Weakly Bounded Molecular Aggregates (Pablo Villarreal)

This school and the meeting took place at the Comodoro Hotel, which is located in the west part of Havana. The purpose of the meeting was to stimulate discussion among scientists working in the chemical physics field related to structure and dynamics of molecular systems. The main topics covered were: Structure and Energetics of Molecular Systems, Dynamics and Reactivity of Isolated Molecular Species, Dynamics of Molecular Species Embedded in Small and Large Clusters, Dynamics of Molecules in the Condensed Phase (liquid, solid) and at Surfaces, Control of Chemical Reactions, Collisions with Surfaces.

Keynote lectures were given by Zamik Rosenwaks (Beer Sheva, Israel), Osman Atabek (Paris, France), Stephen Berry (Chicago, USA), Hiroki Nakamura (Okazaki, Japan), Jeremy Hutson (Durham, England), Joel Bowman (Atlanta, USA), among others.

The conference was sponsored by the Cuban Physical Society, International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, IUPAC, and the Interdivisional Group of Physics for Development from the European Physical Society. The international scientific committee consisted of Vincenzo Aquilanti (Italy), Gerardo Delgado-Barrio (Spain), Antonio Varandas (Portugal), Sylvio Canuto (Brazil), Ramón Hernández-Lamoneda (México), and Jesús Rubayo-Soneira (Cuba, chairman).

The conference was a timely opportunity for scientific exchange among well-known scientists and young researchers from all over the world. Based on the scientific success and interest of this conference, participants agreed that this kind of meeting should be held again in the near future.

More details are available on the conference website <http://usuarios.lycos.es/photodynamics/>.

Jesús Rubayo-Soneira <[email protected]> was chairman of the conference. He is a professor at the Instituto Superior de Tecnologias y Ciencias Aplicadas in Havana, Cuba.