Rarely do so many leading physicists attend one symposium. No less than nine Nobel laureates and some 40 other top researchers gathered for this symposium and this book contains the material presented in invited talks as well as the posters. The 34 papers are organised into three groups corresponding to various aspects of low dimensional physics of solids.

Quantum chaos is becoming a very wide field that ranges from experiments to theoretical physics and purely mathematical issues. In view of this grand span, Nobel Symposium 116 focused on experiments and theory, and attempted to encourage interplay between them. There was emphasis on the interdisciplinary character of the subject, involving a broad range of subjects in physics, including condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, atomic physics and elementary particle physics. The physics involved in quantum chaos has much in common with acoustics, microwaves, optics, etc., and therefore the symposium also covered aspects of wave chaos in this broader sense. The program was structured according to the following areas: manifestations of classical chaos in quantum systems; transport phenomena; quantal spectra in terms of periodic orbits; semiclassical and random matrix approaches; quantum chaos in interacting systems; chaos and tunneling; wave-dynamic chaos. This important book constitutes the proceedings of the symposium.

It is generally felt in the cosmology and particle astrophysics community that we have just entered an era which later can only be looked back upon as a golden age. Thanks to the rapid technical development, with powerful new telescopes and other detectors taken into operation at an impressive rate, and the accompanying advancement of theoretical ideas, the picture of the past, present and future Universe is getting ever clearer. Some of the most exciting new findings and expected future developments are discussed in this invaluable volume.The topics covered include the physics of the early Universe and ultra-high energy processes. Emphasis is also put on neutrino physics and astrophysics, with the evidence for non-zero neutrino masses emerging from both solar neutrinos and atmospheric neutrinos covered in great depth. Another field with interesting new results concerns the basic cosmological parameters, where both traditional methods and the potential of new ones, like deep supernova surveys and acoustic peak detections in the cosmic microwave background, are thoroughly discussed. Various aspects of the dark matter problem, such as gravitational lensing estimates of galaxy masses, cluster evolution and hot cluster electron distortions of the thermal microwave background spectrum, are also discussed, as are particle physics candidates of dark matter and methods to detect them. Cosmic rays of matter and antimatter are included as a topic, and so is the problem of the enigmatic dark energy of the vacuum.

In 2001, the Nobel Foundation celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first Nobel Prize, and all previous Nobel laureates were invited to attend the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm. This gave an excellent opportunity for arranging jubilee symposia with topics that would attract several of the laureates. The chosen subject of “Condensation and Coherence in Condensed Systems” attracted sixteen Nobel laureates and another thirty-five leading scientists.The idea was to bring scientists together from several related subdisciplines: atomic physics, quantum optics, and condensed matter physics, for cross-breeding of ideas, concepts, and experience. Subjects like phase transitions in strongly coupled systems, Bose-Einstein condensation in weakly coupled systems, macroscopic quantum phenomena, coherence in mesoscopic structures, and quantum information were intensively discussed from different points of view. Coherence phenomena in condensed systems were emphasized. A special session was devoted to the emerging field of quantum computing, with experimental and theoretical results reported for different types of qu-bits. The 2001 Nobel Prize awarded to Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl Wieman, “for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates,” gave an extra flavor to the theme of the Centennial Symposium.