The activities and excitement of Monday carried over to Tuesday. Several symposia continued their sessions, a few began sessions today. The day also marked the beginning of the exhibit as well as the poster sessions.

There were two interesting talks in Symposium X continuing with the theme on historical aspects of semiconductors. The first was by Robert Hall (General Electric) on the origins of the semiconductor laser. The second was by Harry Leamy (University of North Carolina) on the development of silicon crystals - from small to very, very big.

A panel discussion in Symposium Y was held in honor of the 10th Anniversary of pulsed laser deposition (PLD) of high-temperature superconductor films. While PLD has not yet blossomed commercially, and even the first applications may not be for high-temperature superconductors, the tremendous value of this technique and the role of these superconductor materials shined through. As one panelist said, PLD is the "fastest thin-film prototyping technique." The technique as a research tool is able to take a material of potential interest of essentially any composition and very quickly deposit it into a thin film. The role of the superconductor frenzy was to catalyze PLD development.

To give a flavor of the breadth of the meeting topics, within Symposium R, there was an invited talk by John Banhart (Fraunhofer Institute) reviewing the production methods for metallic foams or porous metal structures. The major methods of forming porous metals using metal vapor, liquid metal, metal powder and metal ions were reviewed. The technique of GASAR, solid-gas eutectic reactions precipitating gas at a solidification front was also described. In general, the higher the melting point of the metal, the more difficult it is to make it porous. For structural applications, the porous material made as a sandwich structure. The speaker showed the example of a concept car made by Karmann which uses Al foam for the rear seat back. A number of similar applications can be envisaged for these materials depending on several factors including (going from open structures to closed structures) heat exchangers, filters, catalyst supports, bearings, sound absorption and structural applications.

Polymer organic electroluminescent displays (Symposium G) were described by Georg Wittmann of Siemens, Germany. The devices described were based on a fluorene-based emitter and a hole transport layer in a polymeric organic bilayer structure. With a brightness of 100-200 cd/m2, low power consumption, good stability and life > 5000 h, such devices hold great promise for various display applications.

Polymer optical fibers are beginning to show potential with the promise of replacing silica based optical fibers. A talk by Lee Blyler Jr in Symposium DD showcased the development of low-loss graded index polymer optical fibers as high bandwidth media for data communications at Lucent Technologies. The two materials discussed were PMMA and a perfluorinated glassy polymer. Refractive index raising dopants such as benzyl benzoate are used to create a graded index profile. Polymeric fibers are preferred over silica fibers mainly because of the difference in elastic modulus. Polymer fibers are significantly more flexible. Applications can be found in premises networks, intrasystem interconnections and home networks.

Several symposia held poster sessions in the evening. Three posters were selected to receive poster awards by the Meeting Chairs.

T5.5 "The plasticity response of SiC and related isostructural materials to nanoindentation: slip vs densification" Trevor Page (Univ. of Newcastle, UK), Laura Reister (Oak Ridge National Lab) and Sarah Hainsworth (Univ. of Newcastle, UK).

F5.25 "Separation of GaN thin films from sapphire substrates using pulsed laser processing" William Wong, Timothy Sands, Nathan Cheung (University of California, Berkeley).

AA6.10 "Structure and surface morphology of epitaxial Ni films on MgO(111) and (001) substrates: evidence of van der Waals epitaxy" Per Sandstrom, Erik Svedberg, Jens Birch, Jan-Eric Sundgren (Linkoping Univ., Sweden).