About RQ and ISMANAM
The year 2020 was a special one for the scientific community of metastable materials, in particular for these whose scientific interests stem from rapidly quenched materials. It was a round sixty years from the publication of the paper Non-crystalline Structure in Solidified Gold-Silicon Alloys by W. Klement, Jun., R. H. Willens and Pol Duwez in Nature, vol. 187, pp. 869-870 (3rd September 1960). This was an enormous breakthrough in materials science, which has resulted in the continuously growing interest in metallic glasses and other non-equilibrium materials.
It was also the fiftieth anniversary of the first scientific conference devoted to metastable materials: the International Conference on Metastable Metallic Alloys (now considered the first Rapidly Quenched & Metastable Materials conference, or RQ in short), held in 1970, in Brela, Yugoslavia (today in Croatia). This was followed by the next meeting in Boston, USA in 1975 and later by triennial meetings in: Brighton, UK (1978), Sendai, Japan (1981 and 1993), Würzburg, Germany (1984), Montreal, Canada (1987), Stockholm, Sweden (1990), Bratislava, Slovakia (1996), Bangalore, India (1999), Oxford, UK (2002), Jeju Island, Korea (2005), Dresden, Germany (2008), Salvador, Brazil (2011), Shanghai, China (2014) and Leoben, Austria (2017).
The RQ conferences were originally a forum for the rapidly quenched metals scientific community, which has grown swiftly since the 1970s. In the middle of the 1980s it started to expand to researchers working with amorphous alloys and various metastable materials, not only metals, prepared by other methods such as mechanical alloying, gas condensation, thin film fabrication techniques and even "slow" quenching (for making bulk metallic glasses).
Parallel to the RQ conferences, scientific meetings under the name of the International Symposium on Metastable, Amorphous and Nanostructured Materials (ISMANAM) , which were dedicated to various types of metastable materials were initiated by Prof. Alain Reza Yavari. They have been held every year, gathering scientists from all over the world to present and discuss the results of their research in the fields of amorphous, nanocrystalline and other metastable materials obtained with numerous techniques, such as rapid cooling, mechanical alloying, severe plastic deformation, irradiation, thin film deposition, just to name a few of them. The first ISMANAM symposium was held in Grenoble, France (1994) and was followed by meetings in Quebec, Canada (1995), Rome, Italy (1996 and 2018), Sitges, Spain (1997), Wollongong, Australia (1998), Dresden, Germany (1999), Oxford, UK (2000), Ann Arbor, USA (2001), Seoul, South Korea (2002), Foz do Iguaçu, Brasil (2003), Sendai, Japan (2004), Paris, France (2005 and 2015), Warsaw, Poland (2006), Corfu Island, Greece (2007), Buenos Aires, Argentina (2008), Beijing, China (2009), Zürich, Switzerland (2010), Gijón, Spain (2011), Moscow, Russia (2012), Turin, Italy (2013), Cancún, Mexico (2014), Nara, Japan (2016), San Sebastián, Spain (2017) and Chennai, India (2019).
The International Advisory Committee of RQ and the Steering Committee of ISMANAM have decided that the next editions of the conferences, 17th RQ and 27th ISMANAM, will be held jointly in Warsaw, Poland, from 20th to 25th August 2023.
Due to the pandemic and the war in neighbouring Ukraine, the event had to be delayed with respect to the original year, when two round anniversaries could be celebrated.
RQ 17 and ISMANAM 27 will be an opportunity to share the news and ideas on fundamental and applied research in the field of metallic glasses and other amorphous materials, nanocrystalline materials, other metastable materials, their processing, structure, properties and applications. For the detailed list of topics click here The sessions will include plenary and invited lectures given by distinguished scientists as well as oral and poster contributions. An exhibition of materials, equipment and services related to the rapidly quenched and metastable materials is also planned to promote interaction between researchers and industry.
