Nitride Semiconductors

The 10th International Conference on Nitride Semi‐ conductors (ICNS‐10) was held in Washington, DC, USA from 25th to 30th August 2013. The conference continues the successful series of biennial events started in Nagoya in 1995, and followed by meetings in Tokushima (1997), Montpellier (1999), Denver (2001), Nara (2003), Bremen (2005), Las Vegas (2007), Jeju (2009) and most recently Glasgow, Scotland in 2011. Despite ongoing global economic challenges, the conference was very well attended with 893 attendees from 31 countries enjoying a summer week in Washington, experiencing American culture, through tours of some of America's most historical monuments or of nine world‐famous museums, in addition to the scientific program. The steady attendance is testament to the continuing development of III‐nitrides as a material for a wealth of applications, including those needed for a 'greener' world, with increasing applications in more powerful and efficient lighting, electrical power manipulation, and electric vehicles. A total of 932 abstracts were submitted to the conference, leading to 271 oral and 504 poster presentations. The field continues to grow and diversify, and as a result, the conference series ran four parallel sessions. The meeting was divided into 20 different symposia, covering the entire spectrum of III‐nitride semiconductor research and application, extending to cover newer, or less developed concepts such as solar cells and sensor applications. The organizers are very grateful to the 52 members of the program committee who worked tirelessly to solicit and then rank the submissions, as well as identifying topics and stimulating invited speakers. We are particularly grateful to the subject chairs (A. Doolittle, M. Wraback and D. Jena) and regional chairs (F. Ponce, Y. Nanishi and A. Krost) for their invaluable help and advice, and to Z. Sitar, S. Keller, W. Goetz, L. Schowalter and T. P. Chow for coordinating the stimulating rump sessions. Many thanks are due to the International Advisory Committee for their guidance concerning the event arrangements, conference structure and invited speakers. We would especially like to acknowledge the sponsors and agencies for all their financial support, particularly the Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, Sandia National Laboratory, National Science Foundation, Zeiss, Nichia, Laytec, and Nitride Semiconductors Foundation of Japan who together sponsored 94 young scientists with travel support. Furthermore we thank Aixtron, Osram, Plasma‐Therm, Crystal IS and Dow Electronic Materials for sponsorship of social functions. We also thank the 33 exhibitors who participated in the meeting. Finally, we especially want to thank the Materials Research Society and the Gaylord National Resort for meeting and local arrangements assistance. We received 182 submissions for the conference proceedings to be published in physica status solidi, using their standard evaluation procedures. Of these, 158 have been accepted for publication in this special volume, with 13 being accepted for the special sections: Phys. Status Solidi A. We are grateful to the editorial support provided by Stefan Hildebrandt, Julia Hübner and their team in bringing the proceedings together, as well as to our Guest co‐Editors (D. D. Koleske, H. Amano and M. Kuball) who worked diligently to arrange quality reviews of submitted manuscripts. Finally, we thank all those who attended and contributed to making ICNS‐10 such an enjoyable conference and we look forward to meeting you all again in Bejing at ICNS‐11 in 2015. (© 2014 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)