International Conference on Auroral Physics

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The purpose of this grant is to provide financial support for an International Conference on Auroral Physics which will take place at St. Johns College in Cambridge, England from July 11 to 15, 1988. Space physics, particularly the subject of solar terrestrial interaction, has progressed very rapidly since the late 1960's. The various spaceborne low altitude particle and field measurements over the polar region and the global auroral imaging capability on several spacecraft have brought auroral physics into a new era. On the other hand, because of the complication of each specific instrumentation, and the need for a higher level of knowledge in interpreting the observations, many scientists doing auroral-related investigations focus on relatively narrow topics. Communication and information interchange have not matched the recent rapid progress in both observations and theoretical work. This interchange is particularly difficult in auroral physics because activities are spread over many disciplines: atomic and molecular physics, geomagnetism, ionospheric physics, spectroscopy, magnetospheric physics, optics, theoretical plasma physics, space instrumentation, etc. There has not been any dedicated conference on auroral physics for over ten years, even though there have been numerous conferences on magnetospheric topics which included only certain parts of auroral phenomena. The purpose of the international conference is to bring scientists who are working and interested in different aspects of auroral research, and scattered in the various disciplines together to review and discuss the state of knowledge of auroral phenomena. More importantly, scientists must know others' present endeavors. This meeting will, of course, stimulate further collaboration is auroral research across different disciplines. A monograph will be published. Furthermore, this conference will be able to encourage young scientists to participate and identify future research in his/her specialized discipline as well as an opportunity to broaden into other disciplines.