The Fullerenes and Related Materials Symposium began with a brief history of the fullerene field and its role in the MRS Fall Meeting, where the very first results in this new field exploded onto the scene three years ago. The Fall 1993 meeting represented an opportunity to reflect on how the field has developed and where it may be headed. A number of speakers addressed the general question, "What are C60 and other fullerenes good for? " Among those applications mentioned were lubricants, storage batteries, diamond films, hydrogen storage, ink additives, superconductors, and rocket propulsions. One group reported that fullerenes " ... work well as a lubricant in low humidity vacuums and may be a candidate for precision lubrication uses in space." The authors further report that the fullerene molecules loosely bond together to form "clusters" resembling blackberries. When the pressure and friction grew great enough to collapse these clusters, the remaining individual spherical molecules continued to provide the rolling, lubrication effect. jg p.2.

This volume contains the proceedings of the symposium 'Science and Technology of fullerene Materials, ' held at the 1994 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston from November 28 to December 2. This symposium was international in character, and was planned to provide a multidisciplinary discussion of all levels of fullerene-based materials science, with a special focus on new technological advances in the development and application of fullerenes and related materials. The symposium comprised 21 invited talks and 113 contributed oral and poster presentations, broadly covering both experimental and theoretical results of the ongoing efforts to create, characterize, and find applications for fullerenes and related novel carbon materials. The diversity of conditions leading to fullerene formation was demonstrated by reports showing that flame production of fullerenes is quite practical, that a solar furnace can make fullerenes, and that fullerenes are prominent in certain regions of ordinary candle flames. Similarly, production of carbon nanotubes was reported not only in cathodic deposits, but also in flame soots, pyrolysis products of hydrocarbons, soot produced by laser vaporization of graphite, and in arc fullerene generators with added metal catalysts. Other nanotube papers focused on purification and on field emission from nanotube tips as a factor controlling the arc plasma during growth and a potentially useful phenomenon enabling fabrication of novel cold cathode field emitters. Fullerene-like particles and nanotubes based on non-carbon layer compounds such BN and MoS and its analogs were reported. jg p.12.

This symposium, the third held as pant of the MRS Fall Meetings series, touched on a wide range of topics covering static and dynamic properties of small confining systems: probing of confined systems, structure and dynamics of liquids at interfaces, nanorheology, adsorption, diffusion in pores, and reactions. Panticipants from various disciplines shared different points of view on the questions of how ultrasmall geometries can force a system to behave in ways significantly different than its behavior in the bulk, how this difference affects molecular properties, and how it is probed. The contributions in the book reflect the broad range of topics discussed at the meeting, all related to dynamics in small confining systems. We hope that the interdisciplinaty nature of the book and the meeting will help to bridge the gap among the different approaches and methods presented. The papers appear in the book in the order of their presentation during the symposium, which was organized in sessions entitled: Probing Confined Systems; Structure and Dynamics of Thin Films; Nanorheology; Diffusion in Porous Systems; Adsorption and Phase Transitions; and Reaction Dynamics. (MM).