Issue 1, 2014
Issue 2, 2008
As announced in newsletter #1 2008, Risto Nieminen from Helsinki, will leave NORDITA on July 1st, 2008. A new director, Larus Thorlacius from Iceland, will take up his duties on August 1st , 2008. The deputy director Ulf Wahlgren, is appointed until July 1st, 2009, and will continue in this position.
NORDITA is presently recruiting two new assistant professors. Two candidates have been offered the positions. Conditions etc. are presently discussed.
The recruitment process for both the assistant professor and the fellow positions is now completed.
Six applicants to the fellow positions have accepted to join Nordita:
Jonas Larson has already started at Nordita, and the remaining fellows will arrive during 2008
Nordita in April
The schedule for programs from fall 2008 to spring 2010 has now been finalized.
In addition there will be two 2-week workshops, one in 2008 and one in 2009:
All information can be found on http://www.nordita.org/events/index.php
Workshops, conferences and summer-schools
A number of workshops and conferences are planned for 2008:
Held in Copenhagen from 16 June 2008 to 4 July 2008, this workshop is organized by the Niels Bohr International Academy and Nordita. It will consider a number of problems common to strongly interacting cold atomic gases and systems of quarks and gluons. Two such themes are cold gases in optical lattices, and Fermi gases with resonant interactions.
Web site: http://indico.nbi.ku.dk/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=6
August 18-22, 2008. The main topics of the conference are
* Dark matter candidates * Dark matter direct searches * Dark matter indirect searches * Connections with accelerator searches * Halo models and structure formation * Weak lensing * Neutrino physics * Cosmology and dark energy
Web site: http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=355
Extended workshop (15 Sept - 30 Sept) and conference (24-26 Sept). Registration is now open.
Web site: http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=683
Extended workshop (1 - 15 October) and conference (9-10 October).
Web site: http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=682
Scientists interested in participating any of these programs are encouraged to register on the respective websites. These programs are intended to forster new reseach directions in the Nordic countries, so our Nordic participants are often not experts in the specific field of the program, but are interested to learn about them and to talk to the experts in the field.
All Nordita programs are listed together with other Nordita events on:
http://agenda.albanova.se/categoryDisplay.py?categId=3
This meeting is getting a lot of attention and there are presently 260 registered participants. The web site is http://iau254.nbi.dk/. The organizers are hoping for a strong Nordic participation. The meeting is dedicated to Professor Bengt Strömgren (1908 - 1987).
Scientific rationale:
Numerical simulations based on 'concordance cosmology' have made impressive progress towards a consistent explanation of the formation and evolution of structure in the Universe. The paradigm of hierarchical mergers has also been successful in reproducing the properties of galaxy spheroids. However, a number of fundamental discrepancies remain between the predictions of such models and the disk galaxies we observe throughout the universe today.
Spiral galaxies are key ingredients of the universe. Moreover, we live in one that can be studied in unique detail, and dramatic advances have recently been made in studies of the Milky Way and the galaxies of the Local Group. It is timely, therefore, to review our knowledge of the galaxy disk in the global context, focusing on the Milky Way and its neighbours, and to identify key questions and promising avenues for progress. Discussions at the Symposium will focus on formulating specific projects that can lead to major progress in the near future, using new observational and modelling tools.
1 - 29 February 2008. The actual Program ran during the first 3 weeks and then there was a 1 week conference at the end.
During the program we had 1 regular lecture per week (Friday afternoons) in the framework of the usual Stockholm astrobiology seminars, 1 scheduled discussion session per week (Tuesday mornings), and informal discussions during morning and afternoon coffees at 10 am and 3 pm.
During the program we also had 1 talk that was announced to all Nordita staff as a talk of general interest. This was the talk by Laurence Barron on symmetries in physics and applications to Raman optical spectroscopy. This talk attracted a large number of people from theoretical chemistry.
The emergence of one chirality during crystallization formed a major aspect of the discussions. In fact, Mike McBride wrote a News and Views article that he finalized during the program, which asks Did life grind to a start?
Web site: http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=322
Final Report: http://www.nordita.org/~brandenb/programs/homochirality/report/
17 March - 11 April 2008. The program started with a 4 day conference on the same topic. The actual program ran during the following 3 weeks. The total number of participants was 51, and 8 of them were women. Of the 51 participants, 12 came from the Nordic countries, 24 from Europe, 7 from America, 3 from India, 3 from Russia, 2 from Israel, and one from Australia. During the program we had 21 people, of whom 14 stayed for more than about 3 weeks. Additional funding for the conference was attracted from the Swedish Science Foundation (VR) and the European Science Foundation (ESF) through the AstroSim program.
One of the big scientific questions in dynamo theory that was still quite open by the end of the conference concerned the possibility of magnetic Reynolds number-dependent quenching of the turbulent diffusivity. Several aspects to this question were known, but nothing conclusive yet. A breakthrough came in the third week when several participants came to the conclusion that the testfield method does give valid results also in the nonlinear regime. This and other such highlights can be regarded as great signs of achievement of any program.
Web site: http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=325
Final report: http://www.nordita.org/~brandenb/programs/turbulence/
→ Link to electronic preprints: www.nordita.org/preprints
If you have information about meetings or other items that would be useful to include in Nordita News, please send it to Anne Jifält, Nordita, email: anne@kth.se.