Microquasar Workshop: Microquasars and Beyond

This workshop is the seventh of the series of conferences mainly devoted to Galactic black holes. The conference will cover all topics related to relativistic jet sources in the universe including microquasars, neutron stars, active galactic nuclei, and gamma-ray bursts. The results of the analysis of data from high energy missions (RXTE, Chandra, XMM-Newton, INTEGRAL, Swift, Suzaku, Agile) as well as from ground based observatories in the optical, infrared and radio bands will be presented. The emphasis will be on the formation and evolution of jets, and their relation to other accretion components. The broad context of the workshop will also allow researchers to present their results on the comparisons between microquasars, neutron stars, ultraluminous X-ray sources, active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts.

The workshop also intends to include presentations on recent missions (e.g. GLAST, ASTROSAT) and missions in preparation e.g. IXO concentrating on the prospects of black hole research with those missions. The program will be organized in sessions centered around a limited number of invited reviews, with contributed presentations and ample time for discussion. Young researchers will be encouraged to contribute.

There were important developments in the physics of heavy ions during the past few years. Both developments in the theory, notably, advances in non-perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD)and in experiments, results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), now suggest very strongly that there exists a new phase of matter: the quark-gluon plasma. This fact is of tremendous importance both in our understanding of high energy nuclear phenomena on earth and also, it changes our thinking about compact heavy objects in the sky, such as neutron stars, black holes, etc. The talks given at the workshop explored various aspects of these developments both from the point of view of experimentalists as well as astrophysicists and cosmologists.

Editorial Board
Domokos Gabor (chairman), Kaplan David E., Kovesi-Domokos Susan, Sundrum Raman