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Since 1976 a meeting devoted to recent research on cataclysmic variables ("CV workshop") has been held annually somewhere in North America. Many of the meetings have been held - following a custom older than anyone reading this book - in locations with well-known recreational potential (e. g. Santa Cruz, CA; Boulder, CO). We thought hard about this custom while contemplating the possibility of organi zing a meeting in Massachusetts in the middle of winter. Nobody wants their meeting to go down in history as the smallest and dullest, and it ~ surely be the coldest. But on occasion, meeting organizers have defied custom and scheduled meetings for less~than-trendy places, and gotten away with it (Ur·bana, IL and Rochester, NY must be reckoned as examples of this). Encouraged by the spatial and temporal proximity of the American Astronomical Society meeting (Boston, January 9-12), we thought we might get away with it again, and so came to organize a meeting for January 12-15, 1983, in Cambridge, MA. There was another reason for a meeting at this time and place, we loftily proclaimed in early mailings. No one doubts that the CV's are closely related to the low-mass X-ray binaries ("LMXB' s"), in which the accreting star is usually, or perhaps always, more compact than a white dwarf. Many of the general characteristics of LMXB's sound pretty familiar to any student of CV's: orbital periods in the range 0.
This book is a well-edited and comprehensive survey of the current research in the field of low-mass accretion powered compact binaries, that is, binary stars containing a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole as the primary star and a Roche-lobe filling low-mass as the secondary star. These stars have reached a stage in their evolution where the transfer of mass from the giant phase onto a dwarf or sub-dwarf star demonstrates many different aspects of physics. The volume is essentially a complete analysis of these stars combining theory and observation, and covering observations of low-mass X-ray binaries and both magnetic and nonmagnetic cataclysmic variables, theories of stellar accretion, novae, and evolution of compact binaries.
Recent advances in observational and theoretical efforts in understanding the nature of cataclysmic variables had reached such maturity that there existed a strong, shared feeling among the workers in this field that an international colloquium sponsored by the International Astronomical Union would be timely. To be more specific, this was due primarily to the accumulation of the new data from satellite observatories, such as the International Ultraviolet Observatory (IUE) and EXOSAT, as well as ground-based optical and radio telescopes, and the advances in modeling the putative accretion disks and the thermo-nuclear run-away phenomena in the vinicity of the white dwarf stars in cataclysmic variables. A series of workshops on this subject held in North America over the past several years and that held in Europe in 1985 had all contributed to the advances in our knowledge that led to IAU Colloguium No. 93, held in Bamberg from the 16th to 19th of June 1986. In all, 157 astronomers from 27 countries participated in this conference. Judging from the papers presented, both invited and contributed, and from the enthusiasm seen in discussions, the meeting was indeed a success.
In 1993 we began to consider the possibility of holding a conference on Catacysmic Variables (CVs) at Keele University. There have been several meetings in the area of CVs recently (e. g. Eilat, Abano-Padova, Capetown). However as preparations for the Keele meeting progressed we realized that, while there had been a number of IAU meetings devoted to related and to peripheral topics (such as IAU Colloquium 122 on Classical Novae in 1989, IAU Colloquium 129 on Accretion Disks in 1990), there had been no IAU-sponsored conferences in the area of cataclysmi/: variables (CVs) for a number of years. We felt therefore that the time was ripe to have an IAU meeting de voted to an overview of CVs and related objects and the SOC organized the conference such that there was an emphasis on invited reviews of the most recent advances in the field. The conference covered both CVs and LMXBs and the inter-relations between them. The meeting was held at a time when powerful satellite observatories, and rapid improvements in ground based instrumentation, had led to many advances in both CV and LMXB research. The conference provided a forum to review observations from ASCA, EUVE, ROSAT, Ginga and the recently-refurbished HST. Photo metric, spectroscopic and polarimetric observations of CVs and LMXBs have thrown new light on the distribution of matter and the nature of the stellar components in these systems.