Abstract
The latest biennial conference of the Electron Microscopy and Analysis Group (EMAG) of the Institute of Physics was held at the University of Sheffield on 9–11 September, 2009. In addition, the Advanced School associated with the conference was run at the University of Sheffield on 8 September. It was particularly pleasing to return to Sheffield after ten years, the successful and memorable EMAG 99 having been held here too. The subject areas covered at EMAG 2009 were advanced electron microscopy techniques; investigating structure-property relationships in advanced materials; nanophysics and nanotechnology.
The EMAG 2009 conference attracted 172 delegates while the Advanced School had a full complement of eighteen attendees. Three plenary lectures were given to the whole conference and invited contributions were presented within the theme of each of nine parallel sessions. There were 54 contributed oral presentations within these parallel Sessions and a further 89 poster presentations. All authors were invited to contribute a paper to this Proceedings volume and 108 papers are presented here. I thank all who presented at EMAG 2009 and those who provided a paper for this Proceedings. Each paper was peer reviewed by two reviewers and I also want to thank those colleagues who helped with this essential task. In this volume, the plenary papers are presented first followed by all papers presented in each themed session. These sessions are ordered alphabetically. Within each Session, the invited presentations are presented first, followed by oral and poster contributions together.
Another activity of EMAG which is directed primarily at less experienced scientists is the Advanced School. This year, this was on Nanofabrication and Nanomanipulation and I want to thank Guenter Moebus and his colleagues at th University of Sheffield for putting on such an excellent Advanced School.
The EMAG series of conferences are well-known not only for the academic conference but also for the major trade exhibition which runs in parallel. This requires a great deal of additional planning and effort on the part of the conference department of the IoP but particularly by representatives of the exhibiting companies. This year there were 29 exhibitors, several of whom brought major items of equipment to demonstrate to delegates. Here I want to thank all the exhibitors, Jill Cowlard and Nicola Deedman of CEM and Pete Lander of JEOL for their efforts in making the trade exhibition such a success.
Finally, sincere thanks to the other members of the EMAG committee, especially Pete Nellist for his work on the scientific programme, and Guenter Moebus, Thomas Walther and colleagues for their invaluable work 'on the ground' at Sheffield, and also to Claire Garland and Lisa Cornwell at IoP for all their hard work and for keeping the academics under control!
Richard Baker University of St Andrews EMAG Chair and EMAG 2009 Proceedings Editor
Session Editors Richard Brydson Stephen Donnelly Ian MacLaren David McComb Günter Möbus Peter Nellist Dogan Ozkaya Thomas Walther