Localization, Interaction, and Transport Phenomena

Book excerpt: When we first had the idea of organizing the International Conference on Localization, Interaction, and Transport Phenomena in Impure Metals we expected to bring together at most a hundred physicists. The fact that more than a hundred and fifty participated clearly shows that the topic of the meeting was of great interest to an important fraction of the solid state physics community. In fact, remembering that the localization problem is already a quarter of a century old, it is quite amazing to see how, during the last five years, new and very successful theoretical models emerged which were confirmed by sometimes ingenious experiments. The number of groups involved in the study of localization or related problems in the transport properties of matter even seems to be increasing. The main purpose of this conference was to review the present status of activities in the localization field and hopefully to stimulate new ideas. A study of the Conference Proceedings ascertains that we were successful in reaching these two goals. Moreover, the presence of the authors of the about ninety contributed papers published in the supplement volume assured the very lively atmosphere which characterizes successful conferences. We think that this was the most important ingredient for achieving the second goal in particular. We thank our sponsors for their support, which was given unreluctantly and generously. Especially, we gratefully acknowledge the hospitality of the PTB and the city of Braunschweig during the time of the meeting.