Support for Sagamore 15 conference on electron charge spin and momentum density

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Science advances not only because researchers publish their work for scrutiny by others but, more importantly, because they meet to discuss their results and debate its implications at conferences and workshops. Some conferences are great jamborees covering several topics with many parallel sessions and people dispersing outside the sessions. Other conferences are smaller, more coherent and are held out of town so that the group cannot escape and has plenty of time for informal discussions as well as the formal sessions. The setting has to be attractive for this to work.The Sagamore conference triennial series on electron density distributions belongs to the latter category. About 100 physicists, chemists and crystallographers, who study the role of electrons in determining the properties of a wide range of materials will meet together for 4-5 days in the UK for the first time in the 40 year history of the conference series. The venue is a hotel in the Warwickshire countryside. There they will discuss how knowledge (experimental and theoretical) of the behaviour of the electron distribution can aid our understanding of materials as diverse as superconductors, magnets and nanoparticles on the one hand and, on the other, chemical compounds ranging from the simplest molecules up to large molecules of biomedical and pharmacological importance (proteins, viruses, enzymes and drugs). The power of synchrotrons - immensely powerful x-ray sources - combined with other traditional methods of study such as neutron diffraction, has revitalised the field in the past decade, for example allowing studies to be carried out as reactions proceed. We can now follow changes in the electron density distributions as chemical reactions and magnetic transitions proceed as a function of time (e.g. photo-crystallography), temperature and pressure, rather than looking at a fixed state and this is proving exciting and revealing, especially when we combine it with information from related spectroscopies. The purpose of this grant application is to ensure that the leading speakers will indeed come and that all UK researchers, including young scientists and research students will be able to take part in the meeting and benefit from their interaction with the leaders in the field. An EPSRC contribution amounting to approximately 13% of the costs is requested.