Specialist Meeting on Carbon (SMC-2011)

SMC-2011

Chairmen: Dr. Stephen Muhl & Sandra Rodil (IIM-UNAM)

In 1997 a collection of leading scientists from Europe decided to initiate a series of biannual meetings to discuss new developments in the field of amorphous carbon (a-C); the Specialist Meetings on Amorphous Carbon (SMAC). The principal aim of the meetings was to bring together distinguished experts to address the recent advances in the understanding of the fundamental properties of a-C and to discuss the state-of-the-art in technological applications of a-C thin films. The atmosphere of the meeting was chosen to permit and promote informal, intense and in-depth discussions, together with providing the opportunity to address certain critical issues and assess the future prospects of the field. Highly successful three day meetings were arranged in Cambridge, UK 1997, Singapore 1999, Mondovi, Italy 2000, Barcelona, Spain 2002, Trento, Italy 2004 and Crete, Greece 2006.

In 2007-8 the conference organizers came to the conclusion that the field of amorphous carbon was becoming well established and that the research activities had reached a certain level of saturation, such that the original reason-for-existence of the meetings had to a large extent been achieved and further SMAC meetings were not planned.

The present group of scientists consider that an extended version of the original meetings could be very beneficial to the present research involving carbon. Today the study of carbon is a very important area of scientific and technological research and basically the field is divided into three parts; sp3 bonded carbon in the form of diamond, nano-diamond and ultra-nano-diamond (Diam), various forms of nano-structured sp2 bonded carbon including graphene, fullerenes, nano-tubes, nano-walls, nano-onions, etc. (NC) and amorphous, glassy and carbon foams which are a mix of sp2/sp3 carbon (a-C). Even though there are groups who work in more than one of the areas, very few scientists work in the three areas and it is more common that the research is focussed on one particular area.

We believe that a scientific workshop involving all the areas of carbon research but focused on the interconnection and interrelation between the different fields would be of considerable benefit to the field. In particular, we feel that an in-depth and detailed examination of the similarities and differences between the synthesis-property relationships for the different carbon types may considerably enhance the understanding of the individual fields of carbon research.

To this end we invite you to participate in the our workshop called the “Specialist Meeting on Carbon” (SMC-2011) by either submitting an abstract for a poster presentation or by just coming to listen to the invited speakers present the results of their latest research.