In 1993, participants from around the world came together at the first general international conference on Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC), addressing themes of BEC that crossed through all types of condensates including helium, superconductors, quasiparticle condensation, and condensation in nuclear physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Much of the work presented at this meeting was published in the “green book,” titled simply Bose-Einstein Condensation, edited by Allan Griffin, David Snoke, and Sandro Stringari and published by Cambridge University Press in 1995.
With the announcement of the observation of BEC in cold atom systems in 1995 at the second international conference on BEC in Strasbourg, the focus of this meeting turned almost exclusively to cold atom condensates and evolved into the BEC conference series now held biennially in Sant Feliu de Guixols, Spain. In 2003 a separate conference series focusing on BEC of quasiparticles was created, known as ICSCE.
In 2013, many of the original participants in the 1993 BEC conference came together at a new workshop to discuss many of the same universal themes of BEC cutting across the fields such as helium, cold atoms, quasiparticles, photons and lasers, and astrophysics and cosmology, in the first Universal Themes of Bose-Einstein Condensation (UBEC) meeting in Leiden, Netherlands. A second volume, the “blue book” titled Universal Themes of Bose-Einstein Condensation, very much in the spirit of the “green book” twenty years earlier, edited by Nick Proukakis, David Snoke, and Peter Littlewood, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, largely based on contributions from the participants at the UBEC meeting in Leiden.
At the Leiden meeting, it was agreed by all not to wait another twenty years for another broad-based meeting, and it was agreed to hold regular UBEC meetings every 5-6 years. The second UBEC meeting will be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, April 1-5, 2019.