The Fourth International Symposium on Atomic Cluster Collisions

The Fourth International Symposium on Atomic Cluster Collisions: Structure and Dynamics from the Nuclear to the Biological Scale (ISACC 2009) has held July 14 – 18, 2009 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The meeting was organized by Oakland University and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. Visiting Assistant Professor Eugene Surdutovich was the conference co-Chair representing OU. The symposium focused on the structure and properties of nuclear, atomic, molecular, biological and complex cluster systems studied by means of photonic, electronic, atomic and cluster collisions, high resolution mass spectroscopy, ion traps, versatile tunable lasers, new detectors and imaging techniques, NMR and atomic force spectroscopy.

Two groups at OU contributed to the conference proceedings. David Becker, an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemistry, and colleagues including Distinguished Professor Michael Sevilla, reported on Radical Formation and Chemical Track Structure in Ion-Beam Irradiated DNA (AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 1197, Pages 201-208). Then Surdutovich and his international team of collaborators described A Multiscale Approach to the Physics of Radiation Damage (Pages 209-216). Together, these studies are providing new insight into how high energy particles interact with biological tissue, and this knowledge may have important implications for the treatment of cancer using new techniques such as proton therapy.