The award will provide partial support for an International conference to consider questions regarding the interactions of very high energy cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere. The focus of the conference will be on all types of cosmic ray showers observed in a large variety of different detectors, including photographic emulsions and other electronic particle detector devices. Fundamental questions regarding both astrophysics and particle physics are addressed by data which are likely to be presented. In astrophysics, the sources and the genders of cosmic rays as well as the acceleration mechanisms resulting in their high energies are of profound interest. In particle physics, the nature of the high energy interactions with the atmosphere are important, and can be related to data from the world's highest energy accelerator - the Tevatron collider at Fermilab - from which data should also be presented at the conference. The conference is seventh in a bi-annual series, and is sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
