International conference on Functional Materials and Nanotechnologies (FM&NT-2013), 21–24 April 2013, Tartu, Estonia

Abstract

The annual international conference Functional Materials and Nanotechnologies (FM&NT) was started in 2006 by scientists from the Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia. The warm welcome and open atmosphere of this scientific conference has turned it into an event where people from different countries and different fields come and meet under the shared umbrella of functional materials and nanotechnology. It is particularly important for early stage scientists who are looking for new knowledge and contacts with people from various fields to build their own network. Our Latvian colleagues, with their success in internationalization, made us neighbouring Estonians so jealous that we could not help but propose organising the conference every second year in Estonia.In a way, this conference is a continuation of the idea of the famous Baltic seminars which took place over several decades in the last century. Due to political constraints, these seminars were only open to scientists of former Eastern Europe countries, but had a great popularity and attendance from over the whole Soviet Union. Many collaborations started from the initial personal contact between scientists at these twice yearly seminars, held alternately in Latvia and Estonia.At the FM&NT 2012 conference, the decision was made that Institute of Physics, University of Tartu would organise the next event in Tartu in 2013. FM&NT-2013 was hence held in Tartu (Estonia) from 21–24 April 2013 at the Dorpat Conference Centre.The main selected topics of the conference were: (i) multifunctional materials, (ii) nanomaterials, (iii) materials for sustainable energy applications and (vi) theory. Additionally, the focus in this conference was on studies with the help of synchrotron radiation and other novel light sources such as free electron lasers.The conference provided an opportunity for 300 scientists from 21 countries to meet, establish contacts, exchange knowledge and discuss their research. During the three days of the conference, 14 invited talks were given, 45 oral and five commercial talks by companies were delivered and more than 200 posters were presented and discussed.As an outcome of the conference, 14 contributions were selected as regular papers to be submitted as a special section in Physica Scripta , and they are published in this issue. Additionally, 62 papers submitted based on the conference contributions, were included in IOP Conference Series : Materials Science and Engineering and are available at http://iopscience.iop.org/1757-899X/49/1. Additional information about FM&NT-2013 is available at its homepage http://fmnt.ut.ee/. Future information regarding the conference will be published on the website.Photograph. Participants of FM&NT-2013, the photo was taken in front of the Science Centre AHHAA on 23 April 2013.AcknowledgementThe Organizing Committee would like to thank all the speakers, contributors, session chairs and other staff involved for their personal efforts in making FM&NT-2013 successful and memorable. We express our thanks to all the authors for their research contribution presented in this issue. We express our gratitude to all of the reviewers and editors with special thanks to the Editor-in-Chief of Physica Scripta Dr Suzy Lidström, who took part of the conference with an invited talk. The efforts of members of the IOP Publishing team, especially the publisher Yasmin McGlashan, and the guest editor from the local organizing committee Dr Rainer Pärna, are also gratefully acknowledged.We would like to acknowledge financial support by Tartu University Development Fund, Estonian national projects supporting Materials Science, Science Internationalisation and Centre of Excellence programs based on the contribution of the European Structural Funds and Estonian national funding. Also, the graduate school on ‘Functional Materials and Technologies’ supported by the European Social Fund has given a generous contribution to assist in the participation of our early stage researchers. This support is gratefully acknowledged. We also would like to acknowledge and thank all the sponsors, companies (Raith, Bruker, Vistec Lithography, Saint-Tech, The Doma Group, Armgate and American Elements) who create conditions for our everyday research in the Baltics. We hope that the continuation of the tradition introduced with this conference will strengthen the international cooperation of scientists from Baltic states with researchers from other countries. In particular, we very much value the communication between new generations of researches which takes place, ensuring the fruitful development of science in our countries.The Organizing Committee hopes that the conference FM&NT-2013 gave the participants good insight into recent progress in nanotechnology, sustainable energetics, the processing and modelling of multifunctional materials and research enabled by the use of synchrotron radiation or other novel light sources such as free electron lasers. We sincerely hope that the conference has provided support for the circulation of information and brought together many young and experienced scientists from different fields, leading to fruitful discussions. We hope that all of the participants had an ejoyable and memorable time in Tartu. We welcome you back in the future.