9406938 Das Description: This project supports participation by U.S. physicists in an international workshop on the physics at the Planck scale, to be held in Puri, India, in December, 1994. The Indian organizer is Professor J. Maharana of the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar 751 005, India. The workshop is designed to bring together most of the active physicists of India working in the area, along with some of the most eminent physicists of the world, to discuss some of the most fundamental problems of physics. the Topics will be: physics of black holes and their evaporations, evolution of the Universe at very early epochs, the problem of the cosmological constant, as well as the question of unification of fundamental forces of Nature. Scope: The scientific field of the proposed workshop is one in which the Indian scientific community has made noticeable contributions. There is a real potential that some of the Indian participants in the workshop will contribute to the body of knowledge available in the field. This area of theoretical physics has been popular with scientists from less industrialized countries where modern experimental physics facilities are not readily available. The workshop will provide for exchanges of information and stimulate joint research and collaboration in this relatively low-cost research. ***
