This volume contains the proceedings of the Symposium of The Electrical, Optical and Magnetic Properties of Organic Solid State Materials held at the Fall Meeting of the Materials Research Society, November 27 - December 2, 1989. This was the first MRS symposium to address the new and rapidly emerging areas of organic solids designed for a broad spectrum of electrical, magnetic and optical properties. Most organic compounds in the past have been prepared for either their structural properties. This could be the dawn of a new era in organic materials. (js).

The MRS Symposium Proceeding series is an internationally recognised reference suitable for researchers and practitioners.

The MRS Symposium Proceeding series is an internationally recognised reference suitable for researchers and practitioners.

This edited work contains eight extensive, review-type contributions by leading scientists in the field of synthetic metals. The authors were invited by the organisers of the International Conference on Science and Technology of Synthetic Metals '98 (ICSM'98) to review the progress of research in the past two decades in a unifying and pedagogical manner. The present work highlights the state-of-the-art of the field and assesses the prospects for future research.

Conjugated polymers are attractive from the viewpoint of possible applications as novel nonlinear optical materials and conductive materials. They are also very important as a group of materials of one dimensionality. The progress of research in this field is very rapid. At the present stage it is extremely useful to have review articles giving information on the most recent progress.Relaxation in Polymers contains state-of-the-art reviews on: ultrafast responses in various conjugated polymers with large optical nonlinearity; ultrafast relaxation in polysilanes; electronic properties of polysilanes; fast transient photoconductivity studies of polyacetylene and polydiacetylene; evolution of photoexcitations in polyacetylene and related polymers from femtoseconds to milliseconds; photoexcited states in conjugated polymers, optical properties of halogen-bridged mixed-valent metal complexes and dynamics of soliton pairs in polyacetylene.