Dear participants of the ECSCD-15 / ICSOS-13 conference, 
Dear friends,

We are extremely happy to report the resounding success of the ECSCD-15 / ICSOS-13 event held in Grainau, Germany in late May 2023.  The success is reflected not only in the numbers (see below), but especially in the exceptional atmosphere throughout the conference. We had friendly, fruitful, and sometimes long discussions during the sessions, in the coffee breaks, and also during lunches, dinners, and even at the hotel bar, where new connections were made and the best ideas and future plans were sparked over a few drinks :-)   This remarkable engagement of the audience during the entire event was the big highlight of the conference.

It has been a pleasure organizing this event, and we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all the attendees. Our special thanks go to the invited and contributed speakers, the poster presenters, the chairmen of the sessions, and to everyone who contributed to the success of this conference. Your enthusiasm and active participation made the conference an unforgettable event. We are sure that the connections you gained will continue to grow long after the conference is over.

We also would like to express once again our sincere congratulations to Prof. Dr. Michael Schmid (TU Vienna) on receiving the prestigious ICSOS Surface Structure Prize. We thank all colleagues who nominated outstanding surface scientists for this competition, and also the members of the prize selection committee, who certainly had a difficult task in choosing the most worthy candidate.

We also heartfeltly congratulate Ms. Anja Haags (Univ. Bonn) awarded the ICSOS Young Scientist Prize during the conference. At the same time, we sincerely thank all the participants of the ICSOS Young Scientist Prize competition for delivering outstanding talks and revealing the impressive level of their research. We know that your contributions also made it difficult for this prize committee selecting the winner among exceptional talents. We wish all ICSOS YSP nominees great success and fulfillment in their scientific careers.  

Our special thanks also go to all our sponsors for their valuable support, in particular to the four companies who have supported us (Elmitec, FOCUS, Scienta-Omicron and SPECS), and to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, through SFB 1083 and project no. 516521396). Without them, this conference would not have been possible. 

Finally, we would like to extend our sincerest appreciation to the administration and staff of the Hotel am Badersee for their exceptional hospitality. We are truly grateful for the comfortable and welcoming environment they provided for us.

Thank you all for being a part of this remarkable journey and hope to see you soon at the ECSCD-16 / ICSOS-14 in 2025!

Silke Behlau, Christian Kumpf, Sergey Subach and Stefan Tautz

Group photos on Mt. Zugspitze (check out which is real and which is fake!)

Some numbers on the ECSCS-15 / ICSOS-13:

83 participants from 
14 countries worldwide

1 distinguished guest lecture 
1 ICSOS Surface Structure Prize talk
3 keynote talks
9 invited talks
38 contributed talks
of which
2 were selected for the opening keynote session
5 within the competition for the ICSOS Young Investigator Prize
3 were contributed by our sponsors
24 poster presentations

The 15th European Conference on Surface Crystallography and Dynamics (ECSCD15) and the 13th International Conference on the Structure of Surfaces (ICSOS13) were held as a combined event on May 22nd to 26th, 2023 at the Hotel am Badersee (www.hotelambadersee.de) in Grainau at the foot of the Zugspitze mountain, the highest peak of the German Alps. The conference was organized by the Peter Grünberg Institute of Forschungszentrum Jülich.

For both series this was the first conference after the COVID pandemic. It took place as a face-to-face event and brought together scientists from all over Europe and the world, who are interested in theoretical and experimental studies of structural and electronic properties of surfaces and interfaces.

Several novel material systems have been in the focus of condensed matter research in recent years. Examples are 2D materials and their heterostructures, TMDCs, and topological materials. For all of them, surfaces and interfaces play an important role. The careful investigation of structural aspects at the surfaces and interfaces of these materials, in addition to more traditional metals, semiconductors and oxides, were one of the foci of the conference. Other recent developments that featured prominently are the extension of ultrafast experiments to the investigation of surface structures, the use of angle-resolved photoemission for structural investigations at surfaces, and the possibility to craft atomic and molecular structures with scanning probe microscopes, which allow the creation of designer materials with tailored properties.

History of ECSCD and ICSOS

ECSCD15 and ICSOS13 are both continuations of successful and long-lasting series of conferences dedicated to structure and dynamics of crystalline surfaces and the related properties and processes. Both series were started in the mid-’80th. While mainly the European surface science community was convening at the ECSCD events, its international sister ICSOS was traveling around the world in an regular triennial schedule. In the last years, both series were suffering from the COVID pandemic: ECSCD-14 could only take place as a rather small online event in 2021. Even worse, ICSOS-13, originally planned to take place in Hefei (China) in 2020 or 2021 had to be cancelled due to (still ongoing) travel and event restrictions in the host country.

Under these circumstances, the scientific committees and boards of both ECSCD and ICSOS believe that a joint in-person event organized in Europe is a good restart for both conference series. We are therefore very happy to announce the ECSCD-15 and ICSOS-13 to take place in May 2023 at one of the most picturesque places in Germany.

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