Dear Colleagues and Friends,

after a short summer break, we like to thank you with this email for your coming and your contributions to the first EMMI workshop on `strong and supercritical fields'. It provided us -- after about 12 years since the last meeting on this topic -- with an encouraging view on where we stand presently in strong field physics. Obviously, during the last decade tremendous progress took place with respect to atomic processes in relativistic ion-atom collisions but in particular for the experimental and theoretical study of intense laser matter interactions, including discussion of new and exciting phenomena expected at currently not yet accessible laser field strength. The progress in both fields were illustrated by excellent presentations. The same holds true for the central focus of the meeting, ion-atom collision Z alpha >= 1.

Although it seems to be a difficult task to give a balanced summary on all the topics presented at the meeting, we attempt to give a few conclusions to mark desirable steps to be taken next with respect to supercritical fields in heavy ion collisions. The meeting clearly underlined the great importance of this fundamental research topic and its relevance to a broad physics community. The worldwide uniqueness of the GSI/FAIR facility for addressing this research was pointed out in various talks. Indeed it seems that the puck is now in the corner of the experiments in order to help to isolate individual effects that could not be addresses with the techniques at our disposition in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, it would be desirable to carry out one or the other of the following experiments. The ranking may reflect a preferable time-sequence of execution of these experiments:

Of course these experimental efforts need to be accompanied by theoretical studies. By a close interaction between the experimentalists and the various theory groups involved in this research project, one may expect more novel ideas for the exploration of the physics of supercritical fields.

We therefore hope that, within the framework of the EMMI institute, such atomic studies on supercritical fields may benefit from but also stimulate new topics in superheavy nuclear physics research, and vice versa.

We also prepared a homepage here where we like to make the talks available on the web. We hope that this page will initiate a valuable future resource on the 'atomic physics quadrant' within the goals of EMMI institute. Please, send us a 'revised' version of your talk or give us a message in the case that you do not wish to have your talk accessible on the EMMI_webpage.

This workshop made clear to all participants which further steps are needed to promote this field and to commence the envisioned experimental programs. Indeed, we had a successful meeting with high quality talks and fruitful discussions. near and around

We thank you for all your efforts to make this informal meeting such an interesting and exciting event.

Looking forward to stay in touch and to raise your interest in forthcoming experiments.

With best wishes,
   Sincerely Yours,
        Stephan Fritzsche, Miklos Gyulassy, Thomas Stöhlker