Foreword - Proceedings of the International Conference on Magnetism (ICM 2003)

The International Conference on Magnetism (ICM 2003) was held at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome, Italy, from July 27 to August 1, 2003. ICM 2003 was the 16th of the ICM Conference series, which are held every three years, organised under the auspices of the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). The aim of these Conferences is to provide a forum for the international magnetism community to discuss new concepts, properties and developments in all branches of fundamental and applied magnetism, as well as research on magnetic materials and their applications. The Italian magnetism community was honoured to host ICM 2003 and proud for this opportunity given by IUPAP. The first ICM of the new millennium was held in the Eternal City and this coincidence made the event very special, giving a unique occasion for a meeting point between the past and the future, the old and the new. The Conference provided the state of the art of the research in magnetism, which proved to be particularly rich and exciting: new fascinating topics are emerging, new frontiers of knowledge are opening up, together with new perspectives for technological applications. ICM 2003 was a really international event and significantly exceeded all previous ICMs in number of participants (2081, from 60 countries through the world) (see Table 1 and Table 2; Fig. 1), in number of submitted abstracts (3006), and papers (2048). Submitted abstracts and papers were distributed among 13 Subject Categories. The distribution of submitted papers per Subject Category is reported in Table 3. Categories with the highest share were: 1 - Strongly correlated electron systems (collecting papers presented in SCES sessions) (17%); 5 - Magnetic structure and interactions (15%); 8 - Magnetism of nanoscopic/mesoscopic systems (14%); 4 - Spin electronics and magnetotransport (13%); 5 - Soft and hard magnetic materials (12%).