Proceedings of the 7th International LISA Symposium, Barcelona, Spain, 16–20 June 2008

Abstract

In June 2006 the LISA International Science Team (LIST) accepted the bidpresented by the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) to host the 7th International LISA Symposium. This was during its 11th meeting at the University of Maryland, just before the 6th edition of the symposium started at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.The 7th International LISA Symposium took place in the city of Barcelona,Spain, 16–20 June, 2008, in the premises of CosmoCaixa, amodern science museum located in the hills near Tibidabo. Almost 240delegates registered for the event, a record breaking figure compared toprevious editions of the symposium. Many of the most renowned worldexperts in LISA, gravitational wave science, and astronomy, as well asengineers, attended LISA #7 and produced state of the art presentations,while everybody benefited from the opportunity to have live discussionsduring the week in a friendly environment.The programme included 31 invited plenary lectures in the mornings, andeight parallel sessions in the afternoons. These were classified into sevenmajor areas of research: LISA Technology, LISA PathFinder, LISA PathFinderData Analysis, LISA Data Analysis, Gravitational Wave Sources, Cosmologyand Fundamental Physics with LISA and Other Gravitational Wave Detectors. s for 138 communications were received, from which a selection wasmade by the session convenors which would fit time constraints. Up to 63posters completed the scientific programme. More details on the programme,including some of the talks, can be found at the symposium website:http://www.ice.cat/research/LISA_Symposium.There was, however, a remarkable add-on: Professor Clifford Will delivereda startling presentation to the general public, who completely filled the Auditori—the main conference room, 320 seats—and were invitedto ask questions to the speaker who boldly guided them through thedaunting world of Black Holes, Waves of Gravity, and other WarpedIdeas of Dr Einstein.The Proceedings of the 7th International LISA Symposium are jointlypublished by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (CQG) andthe Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS). This formulahas a precedent in the last Amaldi Conference (Sydney 2007),and was motivated by the impossibility to include all communicationsinto a single CQG volume. Plenary speakers were invited to submittheir contributions to CQG, as were a number of parallel sessionauthors chosen by the session convenors and the Science OrganisingCommittee (SOC). Authors of the other parallel session presentationsand posters were invited to submit to JPCS. All papers have been peer-reviewedprior to being accepted for publication in either journal, and thewhole set is a good representation of the talks we heard during thesymposium.Thanks are accordingly due to all of the authors for their collaborativeattitude and, more generally, to all of the delegates who came to Barcelonaand made the symposium a first-class scientific event. The LISAcommunity has been steadily growing since the symposium launched inChilton, near Oxford (UK), back in 1996. The support of such communitystrongly endorses a complex mission project, whose short term futurerequires such support for a much longer term new era of gravitational waveastronomy and fundamental physics. In this sense, the number of attendees and their active interest in the LISA mission sparks optimism.The 7th International LISA Symposium sponsors are also sincerelyacknowledged. They are: the Albert Einstein Institute (Hannover), theSpanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Generalitat de Catalunya(AGAUR), the Barcelona Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), theUniversity of Barcelona (UB), the Polytechnique University ofCatalunya (UPC), the Spanish Society of General Relativity andGravitation (SEGRE), CosmoCaixa, NASA and the European Space Agency(ESA). The latter provided the LISA PathFinder model, a 1:4 scale model whose primer display we enjoyed during the symposium.Finally, the local organising committee (LOC) and the IEEC staff have giventheir enthusiastic support to the organization in every detail, and haveworked efficiently for months to make the symposium happen. Many thanksto all of them, and congratulations.This is a co-publication with Journal of Physics Conference Series. A selection of papers are published in this issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity with the bulk of the papers, after peer review, published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Alberto Lobo and Carlos F Sopuerta Institut de Ciències de l'Espai (CSIC-IEEC) Guest Editors