The annual MRS Spring Meeting commenced in San Francisco. A record 32 symposia will be held at the San Francisco Marriott over the next five days,covering a broad spectrum of Materials Research topics. While technical talks begin on monday, three tutorials were held today:

Symposium G: Organic light emitting diodes. OLED devices offer the potential for new and cost effective emissive-display technology. The tutorial covered various aspects of OLED tecnnology, including small molecules and polymeric systems.

Symposium L: Physics and materials for ultrahigh-density recording. Various forms of magnetic recording heads and media were introduced and discussed. The tutorial covered recent important advances in materials for recording media, heads and the interface between the two.

Symposium T: Measuring mechanical properties in the nanometer regime. The tutorial presented a good overview of nanoindentation and scanning probe techniques for mechanical property measurements.

Full attendance was reported at the tutorials whose popularity was evident also from the tutorial notes that were snapped up by attendees. The tutorials offer a way to obtain an overview of a field. Three additional tutorials are scheduled on monday and one on wednesday.

Twenty four of the thirty two symposia begin sessions on monday.