The Physics of Cataclysmic Variables and Related Objects

The Physics of Cataclysmic Variables and Related Objects 1 This conference continues a long line of meetings on the general topic of cataclysmic variables (CVs) that started with the first North American Workshop in 1981.The conference was held on the campus of the Georg-August-Universita ¨t in Go ¨ttingen, Germany, on 2001 August 5-10.With 183 participants from 30 countries, it was one of the largest CV conferences ever, reflecting the increasing interest in the physics of accreting close binaries, their rich phenomenology, and the many unsolved problems.The organizers intended that the conference should emphasize the physical processes that underlie the observed phenomena and provide the basis of theoretical modeling.This did not imply a preference of theory over observation, and the outcome was, in fact, a healthy mixture of both.There were 34 invited talks, and lots of time was reserved for prearranged or free discussions and for poster sessions.The discussion sessions were recorded and provide a vivid impression of where the field stands and what problems we are facing.Several of the invited speakers came from outside the CV community, a circumstance that helped to foster discussion, to bring in the expertise from these fields, and to broaden everyone's overall view.The meeting was held at a time when CV research is witnessing paradigmatic changes in several important fields, particularly those of binary evolution and the physics of accretion disks.On the observational and the theoretical sides, advanced technologies have revolutionized our perception of the white dwarf accretors, the donor stars, and the gas streams within the systems.This holds for space-borne observations, in particular X-ray spectroscopy with Chandra and XMM and ultraviolet spectroscopy with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), for ground-based tomographic studies with 8 m class telescopes, and also for advanced computational studies of stars, streams, and disks.The organizers made some effort to include the physics of objects related to CVs, such as low-mass X-ray binaries and supersoft X-ray sources, where similar processes are at work.A full day each was dedicated to (1) the evolution of CVs and (2) accretion disks.Half-day sessions dealt with (3) the properties of primary and secondary stars, (4) magnetic CVs, (5) the physics of outflows, and (6) the relation between CVs and novae.CVs evolve by angular momentum loss from the system brought about by gravitational radiation and by a (more uncertain) magnetically driven wind from the normal star.Isabelle