Proceedings Of The Dalgarno Celebratory Symposium

"On September 10, 2008, more than 125 friends, colleagues ... to join Professor Alex Dalgarno in celebrating his 80th birthday ... A symposium highlighting Dalgarno's many scientific contributions ..."--Preface.

This volume of Advances in Chemical Physics is dedicated, by the contributors, to Moshe Shapiro, formerly Canada Research Chair in Quantum Control in the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia and Jacques Mimran Professor of Chemical Physics at the Weizmann Institute, who passed away on December 3, 2013. It focuses primarily on the interaction of light with molecules, one of Moshe’s longstanding scientific loves. However, the wide range of topics covered in this volume constitutes but a small part of Moshe’s vast range of scientific interests, which are well documented in over 300 research publications and two books.

Written by leading scientists in the field and intended for a broader readership, this is an ideal starting point for an overview of current research and developments. As such, the book covers a broad spectrum of laboratory astrophysics and chemistry, describing recent advances in experiments, as well as theoretical work, including fundamental physics and modeling chemical networks. For researchers as well as students and newcomers to the field.

Written by leading experts in this area, this is the first book specifically devoted to the astrochemistry of dynamically evolving astronomical regions.

A few years ago, a motivation for organizing one more IAU Symposium on star for mation in Grenoble, was the anticipated completion of the IRAM interferometer on the Plateau de Bures, close to Grenoble. This choice was also a sort of late celebration of the genius of Joseph Fourier, born in Grenoble, whose work is the very fondation of in terferometry. At the time when we finally announced the advent of this conference, the first reactions we got from the community were expressions of saturation and even reject, the Symposium being unfortunately scheduled almost simultaneously as two other major meetings on closely related topics, and sponsored by different organizations. A wave of disappointment then reached the organizers. Some of us were enthusiastic enough to help the others overcome their discouragement. Let them be thanked here. There was, indeed, a deeper motivation for organizing this conference. It was to trigger the meeting and communication of physicists and astrophysicists since many of the difficulties met now in understanding the physics of the interstellar medium and its evolution toward star formation are common to several, if not most, other fields of physics. They are assigned to one origin: complexity.

List of members in v. 1- .