JUNE 2005     ISSUE 14

 

Optics of Biological Particles - call for abstracts, reminder of deadline.

 

The deadline for submission of  abstracts for the workshop “Optics of Biological Particles” is

June 15, 2005.

If you are interested to participate in this focused workshop, where we will discuss light

scattering from a variety of types of biological particles, please visit our website

http://cyto.kinetics.nsc.ru/OBP/  .

There you will find all necessary information on the submission of the abstracts.

We intend to support participants of the workshop as much as possible,  by waiving fees, paying

lodging costs, if possible, and, in special cases,  funding the travel costs.

 

If you want to contribute to this workshop, please register and submit your short abstract.

 

Alfons Hoekstra       Gorden Videen             Valery Maltsev

 

====================================================================

From Fernando Moreno,

The Chair of the  8th International Conference on Electromagnetic  and  Light Scattering by Non-Spherical Particles

 

The 8th Conference on Electromagnetic and Light Scattering by Nonspherical Particles: Theory,

Measurements, and Applications, took place at Hotel Salobreña, located in the small village of Salobreña,

Granada, Spain. A total of 83 participants (14 students) from 21 countries attended the conference.

The meeting was organized into oral talks and poster sessions. A total of 47 oral contributions

(8 of them invited talks), and 25 posters were presented. As many attendees recognized, the long coffee

breaks scheduled during the poster sessions allowed the people to strongly interact.  The talks and posters

covered many topics as usual, ranging from dust in Astrophysical environments to Biomedical, Biological,

and industrial applications, and from theoretical studies to laboratory measurements. The extended abstracts of

the Conference have been published in a Proceeding book, which is freely  available from the meeting web site at:

http://www.iaa.csic.es/~confels8/8thBook.pdf.

A call for papers for a special volume of the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative

Transfer has been issued. The (firm) deadline for submission of papers has been set on the 31st of August, 2005.

The Scientific Committee, in its  regular meeting during the Conference, decided the date and place of next

 (9th) ELSNSP Conference: Prof. Nikolai Voshchinnikov agreed to organize the next Conference in St. Petersburg,

Russia, in June of 2006. The specific dates will be promptly announced.

 

I would like to gratefully acknowledge those who helped in the organization of the meeting, the Local Organizing

Committee, and the secretary and technical staff of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía. Special thanks

deserve the following members of the University of Granada: Antonio Molina, Artur Schmitt, Francisco J. Olmo,

José Callejas, and Arturo Quirantes, and the following members of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía:

José Juan López, Olga Muñoz, Daniel Guirado, Fernando Girela, and Antonio Molina (Jr.). Without their

many contributions, the Conference would have never take place. Thanks also go to the Spanish

Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia for providing some funding, and to the Hotel Salobreña staff for providing

accommodations and excellent meeting facilities.

 

=====================================================================

 

Two translationg of Mie's 1908 paper

are now available from the Classic Papers section of www.t-matrix.de

 

G. Mie: Contributions to the optics of turbid media, particularly of colloidal metal solutions.

Royal Aircraft Establishment, Library Translation 1873, 1976, RAE-Lit-Trans-1873.

 

G. Mie: Contributions on the optics of turbid media, particularly colloidal metal solutions ---

Translation. Sandia Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1978, SAND78-6018.

National Translation Center, Chicago, ILL, Translation 79-21946.

 

Thomas  Wriedt

 

=======================================================================

 

DDSCAT 6.1 bug fix

 

DDSCAT 6.0 and DDSCAT 6.1 (04.04.29 and earlier versions) contained an error that affected output

to the files waarbbkccc.sca that are written when IWRKSC=1 is specified in ddscat.par).  This error caused

incorrect values of the Muller matrix elements S_ij to be written for the individual orientations when doing

an orientational average over more than one target orientation.

 

The error did not affect any of the other calculated results.  In particular, the orientationally-averaged

Muller matrix elements (written to the output files waarbbori.avg) were correct, and the total and

scattering cross sections for the individual target orientations were also correct.

 

The bug was in the output routine WRITESCA (file writesca.f), and consisted simply of printing the wrong

variable.  New versions of the complete "plain" and "full" distributions of DDSCAT 6.1, with the new

version of writesca.f, can be downloaded from

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~draine/DDSCAT.6.1.html

 

Users who want only the corrected files version.f and writesca.f can extract them from the gzipped tarfile

with the command

    tar xvfz ddscat6.1_plain.tgz src/version.f src/writesca.f

or

    tar xvfz ddscat6.1_full.tgz src/version.f src/writesca.f

 

We thank Fernando Moreno Danvila for noting and reporting this bug.

 

Bruce Draine