Report 2003
During the past year, the executive of C15 met at the ICPEAC conference held in Stockholm in July. The entire commission has been kept informed of developments via email and a meeting of the full commission will be held at the ICAP meeting held next year in Brazil.
The major activity was to rank the 6 applications received for conference support. The ordered ranking from highest to lowest priority is: International Conference on Atomic Physics (ICAP), International Conference on Atomic and Molecular Data (ICAMDATA), Highly Charged Ions 12 (HCI 12), Hydrogen III, Theory of Atomic and Molecular Clusters (TAMC IV) and Photodynamics.
We have also encouraged conference organizers to use IUPAP support to help physicists from the developing world participate at our international meetings. One conference organizer expressed strong support of this objective but asked what funds would be available. It would therefore be helpful for IUPAP to let conferences know well in advance what financial support they might receive. It is also interesting to point out that the two largest meetings associated with our Commission, ICAP and ICPEAC will both be held next in South America, Brazil and Argentina, respectively.
Several commission members have raised the concern regarding difficulty in obtaining visas for entering/reentering certain countries. This has resulted in a number of prestigious bona fide physicists being unable to give their invited talks. A related issue observed at the ICPEAC meeting was that a number of fraudulent conference applications appear to be submitted by individuals who copy material from physicists websites in order to obtain visas. Assistance from IUPAP on these issues would be most appreciated.