International Conference “VORTEX V” Held in Rhodes

October 15, 2007 (H6).  The Fifth International Conference o n Vortex Matter in Nanostructured Superconductors (VORTEX V) was jointly sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and held in Rhodes, Greece, September 8-14, 2007. The conference was organized by the global research networkNanoscience and Engineering in Superconductivity (NES) (Europe – Japan – USA) as a satellite to the 8th European Conference on Applied Superconductivity EUCAS, held 16-20 September 2007, Brussels, Belgium.

The scope of the Conference concentrated around the main topics of the ESF – NES programme:

• Superconductivity at Nanoscale,
• Superconducting Nano-devices: Science and Engineering,
• Nano-engineered Pinning Arrays,
• Vortex Imaging,
• Vortices in Mesoscopic Superconductors,
• Superconductor / Ferromagnet Hybrids,
• Vortex Dynamics,
• Driven Vortex Lattices, Ratchets, Josephson Junctions and Their Arrays,
• THz Emission,
• Superconducting Elements for Quantum Computing,
• Vortices in Bose-Einstein Condensation, and 
• Optical vortices.

The 130 participants coming from 25 countries benefited from an interesting and dense scientific program consisting of 73 talks and 57 poster presentations.  The organizers (Prof. V.V. Moshchalkov – ESF, Prof. K. Kadowaki –JSPS, and the steering committee) achieved via this and previous VORTEX conferences a coherence in the vortex community, and enhanced scientific collaborations within Europe and on a global scale.  During the conference, many new and fascinating highlights have been presented.   The comprehensive program and abstract book can be read here.

The NES-ESF research network will continue throughout 2012, it is funded by the scientific organization of  15 participating European countries, i.e.: the Austrian Science Research Fund (FWF) , the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (FWO), the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic & the Czech Science Foundation (GACR), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the Natural Science Research Council (FNU), the Estonian Science Foundation,  the Interministerial Committee on Science and Technology (MEC) & the Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), the Academy of Finland, the National Research Council of Italy (CNR),  the Research Council of Norway, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO),  the Swedish Research Council, the Slovak Research and Development Agency, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council UK (EPSRC).

For more information concerning Vortex V or the NES-ESF program, please visit the NES webpage http://www.kuleuven.be/inpac/nes/.