Defect-induced effects in nanomaterials.

'Crystals are like people, it is the defects in them which tend to make them interesting!' said Cambridge Professor Sir Colin Humphrey once upon a time. Today, this statement still rings true. Defects govern the properties of nanostructures to the same or even to a greater extent as they do in bulk solids. Any surface or interface is already a perturbation of an ideal solid, and the role of interfaces increases with decreasing dimensionality of objects. However, the research field of defects in nanostructures extends much farther, encompassing doping, diffusion, radiation effects, phase transitions - virtually all fields of solid-state science and technology. A burst of research activity in two-dimensional materials has been brought about by the isolation of graphene from bulk graphite in 2004 by Geim and Novoselov (Nobel prize in Physics 2010). The invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes crowned with the very recent Nobel prize in Physics awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura goes hand-in-hand with the defect engineering in semiconductors. The first EMRS symposium on defects in nanomaterials was held during the 2012 Fall meeting in Warsaw, and the success of the event was a motivation to organize a follow-up symposium during the 2014 Spring Meeting in Lille. The Symposium E entitled 'Defect-induced effects in nanomaterials' attracted even more participants from all over the world, and this volume includes 36 papers based on presentations from the five days of oral and poster sessions, from May 26 to 30. The program of the symposium comprised 15 invited and 47 oral talks, as well as 98 poster presentations. The presenters came from 44 countries located on five continents: Africa, North and South America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The following topics have been covered: - Swift heavy ion irradiation as the means to tailor nanomaterials; - Effects of grain boundaries and interfaces on diffusion and transport processes in nanomaterials; - Electronic structure of defects in nanostructures; consequences for carrier transport, magnetism, optical and electronic properties, as well as device parameters; - Creation, evolution and properties of radiation defects in nanosize materials and heterostructures; the role of interfaces, nonstoichiometry, strain and adjacent layers; - Defects in two-dimensional materials; - Use of defects as microprobes; - Multiscale computer modeling of defect creation in nanomaterials; - Novel technological processes of micro-, nano- and optoelectronics using defects and radiation effects in nanostructures. The latest achievements in theory and experiment as well as technological applications have been presented and discussed by academic and industrial researchers. We are deeply grateful to all participants who, through their valuable contributions, friendly and open discussions, turned the symposium into an exciting event. We also greatly acknowledge the financial and administrative support of the E-MRS Headquarters which allowed the organization of the symposium. Last but not least, our thank goes to Wiley-VCH that took over the publication of the symposium proceedings. (© 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]