CCP5 Annual Meeting 2009

Structure Prediction

Location: London (Bankside Conference Centre)

Monday 7th to Wednesday 9th, September 2009

The theme for the annual CCP5 meeting this year is Structure Prediction from First Principles. Twenty years ago John Maddox published a celebrated "News and Views" article in Nature [1] in which he provocatively wrote: "One of the continuing scandals in the physical sciences is that it remains impossible to predict the structure of even the simplest crystalline solids from a knowledge of their composition." As in the recent review article [2],we may debate the accuracy of this statement when it was made, and indeed several studies reported prior to Maddox's article had demonstrated the viability of modelling if not predicting structures. However, it unquestionably highlights the challenge offered by crystal structure prediction. Indeed, there is a growing need for reliable and robust methods for predicting the atomic level structures and properties of solids. But, how genuinely predictive are our current techniques? Or in other words, how well has the field responded, over the last twenty years, to Maddox's challenge? This conference attempts to answer this question by surveying current approaches and recent applications and by identifying the challenges and problems that remain.

We invite abstracts for both oral and poster presentations related to developments in either methodolgy or the applications of structure prediction techniques in the following areas: organic, inorganic or metallic clusters; crystal structure prediction including dense and microporous frameworks, molecular packing, orderring, amorphous materials and hybrid inorganic-organic materials (MOFs and ZIFs, as well as COFs); DNA or protein folding; and Evolutionary Algorithms, Monte Carlo Basin Hopping, Simulated Annealing, Particle Swarm, Molecular Dynamics, Tiling Theory and Data Mining applied to finding stable or metastable structures.