February 2012      ISSUE 45

AOGS-AGU Joint Assembly (Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting, WPGM)

SESSION PS20: POLARIMETRY OF PLANETARY SYSTEMS

Dates: 13-17 August 2012
Venue: Resort Worlds Sentosa, Singapore
Website: www.asiaoceania.org/aogs2012
Abstract Submission Deadline: 21 March 2012 (HAS BEEN EXTENDED!)

Polarimetry as a remote sensing tool to explore our solar system, including planetary atmospheres, satellite surfaces, ring systems, comets, asteroids and exoplanetary atmospheres is a rapidly growing field. This session will include invited and contributed talks on: (i) application of the principles of polarization to remote sensing; and (ii) role of polarization as an independent and complementary remote sensing tool to imaging and spectroscopic techniques. Welcome observers, theorists and experimentalists that use polarimetry to study any component of planetary systems and beyond.
Conveners:
Padma Yanamandra-Fisher (Space Science Institute, USA)

Herve Lamy (Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Belgium)
Ludmilla Kolokolova (University of Maryland, USA)

Cosmic Dust Meeting

WEBSITE: https://www.cps-jp.org/~dust/

VENUE: CPS (Center for Planetary Science), Kobe, JAPAN https://www.cps-jp.org/access/

DATE: August 6-10, 2012

OBJECTIVES: This is the fifth meeting on Cosmic Dust. This series of Cosmic Dust meetings aims at finding a consensus among experts on the formation and evolution of cosmic dust: where it comes from and where it goes. The meeting is organized by dust freaks who are very enthusiastic not only to make the goal achievable but also to establish a dust community across Asian and Oceanian countries for the development of cosmic dust research worldwide. For this reason, the primary objectives of the meeting are to bring together professionals who deal with cosmic dust and to provide an opportunity for participants to develop human relations and interactions between the participants.

SCOPE: All kinds of cosmic dust such as

Intergalactic and interstellar dust

Protoplanetary and debris disk dust

Cometary, asteroidal, interplanetary, and circumplanetary dust

Stellar nebular condensates and presolar grains

Micrometeorites, meteoroids, and meteors

Regolith particles

are the subject of discussion. The meeting is open for any aspects of dust research by means of different methods of studies (in-situ and laboratory measurements, astronomical observations, laboratory and numerical analogue simulations, theoretical modeling, etc.). All dust-related topics, for example, the formation of molecules and their reactions on and their desorption from the surface of dust particles, are also welcome. Publishing the proceedings of this meeting as a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal is currently being planned, while paper submission to the proceedings is not obligatory.

ADMISSIONS APPLICATION: Please complete online meeting application at the CPS website in order to attend the meeting. Because the number of participants shall be limited, the online application does not guarantee admission to the meeting. Participants will be determined at the discretion of the SOC and all applicants will be notified of the admissions decision. Priority will be given to those who contribute to oral or poster sessions and retain enthusiasm for discussions throughout the meeting. For further details, please visit the Cosmic Dust website.

IMPORTANT DATES:

13 May 2012, Deadline for Admissions Applications

31 May 2012, Notification of Admissions Decisions

6-10 August 2012, Cosmic Dust

SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (SOC):

Akio Inoue (Osaka Sangyo University, Japan)

Cornelia Jaeger (Friedrich Schiller University, Germany)

Hiroshi Kimura (CPS, Japan) [Chair]

Ludmilla Kolokolova (University of Maryland, USA)

Alexander Krivov (Friedrich Schiller University, Germany)

Aigen Li (University of Missouri-Columbia, USA)

Keiko Nakamura-Messenger (NASA Johnson Space Center, USA)

Tetsuo Yamamoto (CPS/Hokkaido University, Japan)

LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (LOC):

Carsten Guettler (Kobe University)

Akio Inoue (Osaka Sangyo University)

Hiroshi Kimura (CPS) [Chair]

Hiroshi Kobayashi (Nagoya University)

Hiroki Senshu (Chitec/PERC)

Aki Takigawa (The University of Tokyo)

Koji Wada (Chitec/PERC)

Tetsuo Yamamoto (CPS/Hokkaido University)

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Hiroshi Kimura <dust-inquiries@cps-jp.org>

Center for Planetary Science (CPS)

Chuo-ku Minatojima Minamimachi 7-1-48

Kobe 650-0047, Japan

Fax: +81 78 599 6735

BRIEF HISTORY: The Cosmic Dust meeting started in 2006 as a session called COSMIC DUST of the 3rd AOGS (Asia-Oceania Geoscience Society) annual meeting in Singapore. Dust freaks have kept on organizing the session at subsequent AOGS meetings in South Korea (2008), India (2010), and Taiwan (2011). The Cosmic Dust series has been recognized as the most successful session of the AOGS Planetary Sciences Section. In 2012, the time is ripe for being free from organizing restrictions on the AOGS meeting. Therefore, the fifth meeting of the Cosmic Dust series becomes detached, totally independent of any international conference. The past meetings on Cosmic Dust have been held in a relaxed and joyful atmosphere. So will be the coming one!

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LIP 2012
Lasers and Interactions with Particles. Optical Particle Characterization follow-up.
2012, march 26-30^th, INSA de Rouen, CORIA UMR 6614, Rouen, France.
Programme provisionnel

Sunday, march 25th, 2012
Welcome Reception & Registration

Monday, march 26th, 2012
Reception & Registration in the INSA of Rouen
Welcome Address of LIP 2012, (Opening Ceremony)
Keynote lecture: J.A. Lock, Cleveland University, USA. Novel results for scattering of a focused Neuman beam by a sphere.
Session 1. Fundamentals.
Session 2: Near-fields and internal fields

Session 3: Mechanical effects of light.
Welcome reception
Dinner for Honorary chair, Scientific et Advisory committees.

Tuesday, march 27th, 2012
Keynote lecture: B. Pouligny, CNRS, Centre Paul Pascal, Pessac, France.
Optical levitation and long-working distance trapping : from spherical up to
high aspect ratio ellipsoidal particles.
Session 3: Mechanical effects of light. (continued)
Session 4 : Optical particle characterization (large particles)
Garden party : Departure for la ferme de Bray
Norman village meal

Wednesday, march 28th, 2012

Keynote lecture: W. Bachalo, Artium Technologies, Inc., USA Light scattering interferometry : invention, development, and application.
Session 4 : Optical particle characterization (large particles) (continued)
Session 5. Refractometry, Imaging and holography.
Session 6 : Nanoparticles and Brownian motion.

Guided tour of the medieval downtown

Thursday, march 29th, 2012

Keynote lecture: T. Wriedt, Bremen University, Germany. Shaped laser beam light scattering by complex particles using the T-matrix method.
Session 7: Nanoparticles and aggregates.

Departure for tourism program
Conference social dinner

Friday, march 30th, 2012.

Keynote lecture: G. Gouesbet, CORIA UMR 6614, INSA de Rouen, France. A scientific and sociological story of generalized Lorenz-Mie theories.
Session 8: Miscellaneous including multiple scattering.

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New release of the discrete-dipole approximation scattering code DDSCAT

is now available -- DDSCAT 7.2. This supersedes the previous release, version 7.1

As before, the code is written in portable f90, and includes support for OpenMP, the Intel Math Kernel Library, and MPI (although see note below). The distribution includes DDSCAT.f90, CALLTARGET.f90, and READNF.f90, and VTRCONVERT.f90.

A new UserGuide is available from http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1505v1. The complete DDSCAT 7.2 package can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/ddscat The code distribution is ddscat7.2.0_120215.tgz You can also download a set of "worked examples" that are referred to in the UserGuide: ddscat7.2.0_examples_120215.tgz

DDSCAT 7.2 is gratis, subject to the GNU General Public License. [You may copy, distribute, and/or modify the software identified as under this agreement. If you distribute copies of this software, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have.]

As always, please let us know if you encounter problems downloading DDSCAT, or if you have trouble using DDSCAT (but **please** read the manual carefully before reporting problems!!).

Version 7.1 is no longer supported, although it will continue to be available on the google code site. If you have been using Version 7.1, please switch to Version 7.2.

We hope that DDSCAT 7.2 will prove useful in your research. If you publish papers using DDSCAT 7.2, please cite relevant papers describing the DDA and its implementation in DDSCAT, e.g.:

Draine, B.T. 1988, "The Discrete-Dipole Approximation and its Application to Interstellar Graphite Grains", Astrophys. J., 333, 848-872

Goodman, J.J., Draine, B.T., & Flatau, P.J. 1991, "Application of FFT Techniques to the Discrete Dipole Approximation", Optics Letters, 16, 1198-1200

Draine, B.T., & Flatau, P.J. 1994, "Discrete dipole approximation for scattering calculations", JOSA A, 11, 1491-1499

Draine, B.T., & Flatau, P.J. 2008, "Discrete-dipole approximation for periodic targets: theory and tests", JOSA A, 25, 2693-2703

Flatau, P.J., & Draine, B.T. 2012, "Fast near-field calculations in the discrete dipole approximation on regular rectilinear grids", Optics Express, 20, 1247-1252

Note: DDSCAT 7.2 has been extensively tested in single-processor mode. However, it has not been tested with MPI and OpenMP, and it is possible that some of the changes to the code in the 7.1 -> 7.2 transition might lead to OpenMP or MPI problems. If you are a user of MPI and/or OpenMP, please run some test calculations in both single-processor and multiprocessor mode, and compare results, before doing any "production" calculations with MPI and/or OpenMP. If you do such tests, we would appreciate being informed of the outcome.