The International Conference "Dynamics of Systems on the Nanoscale" (DySoN 2010) will take place in Rome, Italy during November 16 – 19, 2010. The meeting venue will be the National Research Council. The DysoN 2010 conference is organized by the Department of Chemistry, the University of Rome "La Sapienza", CNR-Istituto di Metodologie Inorganiche e dei Plasmi and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Goethe University.
This conference will build upon a series of International Symposia entitled "Atomic Cluster Collisions: structure and dynamics from the nuclear to the biological scale" (ISACC 2003, ISACC 2007, ISACC 2008 and ISACC 2009). ISACC started as an international symposium on atomic cluster collisions in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2003 devoted to the physics of atomic cluster collisions. The second ISACC was held at the GSI, Darmstadt, Germany in 2007. Both first and second symposia were satellites of the International Conferences on Photonic Electronic and Atomic Collisions (ICPEAC). The third ISACC returned to St. Petersburg, Russia in 2008. The fourth symposium was held in Ann Arbor, USA in 2009 and was again a satellite of the ICPEAC 2009. The fifth ISACC satellite of the ICPEAC 2011 will be held at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin and will be mainly devoted to collision processes involving atomic clusters. However increasingly during these meetings it has become clear that there is a need for an interdisciplinary conference covering a broad range of topics related to the Dynamics of Systems on a Nanoscale. Therefore in 2010 it was decided to expand upon this series of meetings with a new conference organized under the new title "Dynamics of Systems on the Nanoscale", the DySoN Conference, since this title better reflects the interdisciplinary character of the earlier ISACC meetings embracing all the topics of interest under a common theme.
The DySoN 2010 Conference will promote the growth and exchange of scientific information on the structure-formation and dynamics of animate and inanimate matter on the nanometer scale. There are many examples of complex many-body systems of micro- and nanometer scale size exhibiting unique features, properties and functions. These systems may have very different natures and origins, e.g. atomic and molecular clusters, nanoobjects, ensembles of nanoparticles, nanostructures, biomolecules, biomolecular and mesoscopic systems. A detailed understanding of the structure and dynamics of these systems on the nanometer scale is a difficult and fundamental task, the solution of which is necessary in numerous applications of nano- and bio- technology, material science and medicine.
Although mesoscopic, nano- and biomolecular systems differ in their nature and origin, a number of fundamental problems are common to all of them: What are the underlying principles of self-organization and self-assembly of matter at the micro- and nano-scale? Are these principles classical or quantum? How does function emerge at the nano-and the meso-scale in systems with different origins? What criteria govern the stability of these systems? How do their properties change as a function of size and composition? How are their properties altered by their environment? Seeking answers to these questions is at the core of a new interdisciplinary field that lies at the intersection of physics, chemistry and biology, a field now entitled Meso-Bio-Nano (MBN) Science.
All of these problems, both experimental and theoretical, will be discussed in the DySoN 2010 Conference. Particular attention will be devoted to dynamical phenomena and many-body effects taking place in various MBN systems on the nanoscale, which include problems of structure formation, fusion and fission, collision and fragmentation, collective electron excitations, reactivity, nanoscale phase transitions, nanoscale insights into biodamage, channeling phenomena and many more.
