Conference Reports
Information For future Student Travel Award Winners
The 50th Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials
The conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials celebrated its 50 anniversary at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA from October 30 to November 3, 2005. There were 1548 registrants, making it the largest stand-alone conference in the history of MMM. In fact, the attendance exceeded most Joint Conferences with the notable exception of the San Francisco MMM-INTERMAG in 1998.
The program was also unusually large, with 1405 contributed papers (out of 2142 submitted), 5 symposia, 1 tutorial, and 28 individual invited speakers.
Marcel Muller and Tony Arrott, celebrating their 50th MMM with Conference Chairman, Randy Victora (All photos courtesy of Ron Goldfarb)
A feature unusual to this MMM was a plenary session featuring 5 distinguished speakers, each discussing an important achievement that corresponded (roughly) to each decade of the conference. These talks included basic science, new discoveries in materials, and future directions. Listed chronologically, they were:
1. Magnetism and Magnetic Fluctuations in One, Two and Three Dimensions,
Robert Birgeneau, U.C. Berkeley
2. Computational Quantum Magnetism: Then and Now
Arthur Freeman, Northwestern University
3. Innovation via Insurrection: Nd-Fe-B Permanent Magnets,
Jan Herbst, General Motors
4. Early Development of Thin Film Heads,
David Thompson, IBM (retired)
5. From GMR to the nascent fields of spintronics
Albert Fert, Université Paris-Sud
The session filled the Fairmont’s largest ballroom and included 2 attendees of the original MMM conference 50 years ago: Tony Arrott and Marcel Muller. (There was no MMM conference in 1985 owing to the San Francisco ICM that year.)
After the talks, champagne, cake, appetizers, and beer were used to celebrate the occasion at a cost of ~$39,000 (which may also be a conference record!). We hope the souvenir pub glasses provided to all attendees will encourage good memories of the occasion.
Randall Victora
Chairman of the 50th MMM
victo004@umn.edu
