Preface: phys. stat. sol. (c) 4/7

Abstract

AbstractThe International Workshop on Nitride Semiconductors (IWN 2006) was held in Kyoto, Japan from 22 to 27 October 2006. This workshop was part of a continuing series of IWN, first held at Nagaya, Japan (2000), Aachen, Germany (2002), and Pittsburg, USA (2004). The conference was well attended by 841 participants from 33 countries. From over 550 abstracts submitted, the Program Committee accepted 441 abstracts. There were 11 invited talks including 3 plenary presentations for a total of 96 oral presentations, with the remaining papers given as posters. Among them, 228 manuscripts were submitted and reviewed by the usual evaluation process of physica status solidi. Finally 212 papers were accepted and the present special volume contains the collection of those papers.IWN 2006 was organized as a unified meeting of four independent topical workshops: Growth, Optoelectronic Properties, Optical Devices and Electron Devices. The first half of the week, on Monday and Tuesday, the workshops were held together at Kyoto International Conference Hall, whereas on Wednesday and Thursday, the workshops were separately held at Ritsumeikan University and Kyoto University.At the topical workshops, the activities concentrated on discussion and information exchange rather than just the presentation of the research results. The effectiveness of non‐polar substrates for both electronic and optical devices was emphasized. Point defects and dislocations were suggested to play a significant role in optical properties of AlGaN. Light extraction and thermal management were assessed to be important to design high efficiency white LEDs. The ammonothermal method was proposed as a promising growth method for bulk GaN. We can expect that from such discussions made at the topical workshops new research trends will be derived which will yield further amazing results.The Editors would like to thank the members of the Executive Committee and Program Committee, especially H. Miyake and T. Araki, for their support and advice through the organization of the event. We would also like to express our appreciation to the referees for their careful reading and scientific evaluation of the papers in this special issue. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Stefan Hildebrandt and Julia Hübner for their assistance in the technical editorial process and to physica status solidi for the rapid publication of the proceedings.