The XIth International Conference on Elastic and Diffractive Scattering : Towards the High Energy Frontiers will be held in the Château Royal de Blois, France, from Sunday, May 15th, to Friday, May 20th, 2005. The picturesque old French town of Blois, famous for its XIV-XVIIth century château, is about 170 km (100 miles) from Paris in the beautiful region of the « Châteaux de la Loire ».

Our conference is the eleventh of the series of the International Conferences on Elastic and Diffractive Scattering, founded in 1985 in Blois. Since that time, meetings were organized in New York, USA (1987), Evanston, USA (1989), Isola d'Elba, Italy (1991), Providence, USA (1993), Blois, France (1995), Seoul, South Korea (1997), Protvino, Russia (1999), Prague, Czech Republic (2001) and Helsinki, Finland (2003). In 2005, we will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the series.

The members of the Permanent Committee, the organizers of the different meetings and the coordinators of the series of the International Conferences on Elastic and Difractive Scattering largely contributed to their success.

The “Rencontres de Blois” are international conferences, whose spirit is explicitly multidisciplinary. They have now been organized for a number of years in the city of Blois, in France, and have covered topics ranging from particle physics to chaos theory, life and planetary science. They are a mix of invited and contributed papers. The present conference is the XVIIth Rencontre de Blois.

Every year, our International Conferences on Elastic and Diffractive Scattering adapted their content to the most recent experimental and theoretical results concerning not only Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) but also other fields of particle physics, where diffractive physics is present. The attribution of Nobel Prize in 2004 to three physicists who opened the way of QCD strongly reinforced our discipline - the particle physics.

By their content and by the quality of the participants, our series of conferences acquired an important international prestige. Our very much regretted colleague Jan Kwiecinski wrote in the “CERN Courier”: “A regular feature of the international physics calenderer is the International Conference on Elastic and Diffractive Scattering, known also as the Blois Workshops, after their 1985 birthplace in France […] The valuable content of the Blois meetings has recently become very topical following theoretical progress in understanding high energy behavior in terms of Quantum Chromodynamics and its implications for both present and future experiments” (CERN Courier, No 9, December 1995).

This year, besides classical themes as

- forward scattering
- total cross-sections
- real parts
- Pomeron and Odderon

we cover many other subjects as

- What we learnt from HERA and RHIC?
- LHC physics
- Forward physics from astrophysics
- Forward physics at ILC
- Nonperturbative approaches to high-energy scattering
- The dipole model
- Small-x evolution
- The gluon reggeisation in QCD
- Hard diffraction in QCD
- Diffractive Higgs studies
- Jet quenching
- Diffractive deep inelastic scattering
- Hard diffraction experimental results
- Nuclear shadowing and antishadowing
- Colour transparency
- Spin effects
- Color Glass Condensate approach
- Double charm hadrons
- Tetraquarks and pentaquarks
- B-physics
- String theory and high energy scattering
- QCD/String duality
- Lattice theory results.

Due to the special celebration character of the Conference of this year, we expect a large number of participants to register. However, for technical reasons, we are forced to limit the number of participants by adopting a “first came, first served” criterion. We therefore advice you to immediately complete the pre-registration form and, after making the payment of the registration fees, complete the final registration form.

Deadline for final registration: March 30, 2005

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