Introduction
This is the second IFF annual report now published in English. We have chosen to make this report and thus our scientific results and accomplishments over the past year available to the world wide scientific community. Additionally, this report also serves as the main base of communication to our international scientific advisory board. The articles in this report represent only a partial selection of the numerous projects and collaborations the scientists of the IFF are engaged in. We hope that all of you find it interesting and worthwhile to read through this selection.
In the IFF we again can look back at a scientifically quite successful year. In terms of the number of publications, patents, and invited talks at international conferences we could still keep up the pace of our scientific accomplishments. Furthermore, we are also especially proud that B. Kessler was appointed as a professor at the "Fachhochschule Koblenz" keeping up the leading role of the IFF in providing superior candidates for faculty appointments worldwide. Other outstanding achievements include the award of the Gustav-Hertz prize (2000) of the DPG to G. Schütz and the "Heyn-Denkmünze" of the "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Materialkunde" received by K. Urban.
We are also very happy that we are again complete in terms of having all the chairs of the department filled. As of January 2000 Prof. Jan Dhont actually joined our department to set up his activities in soft matter physics and concentrating on phase transitions and shear flow in colloids.
With this report we want to communicate our results and accomplishments in a general overview and closed form to the scientific community at large. Additionally, we acknowledge our responsibility to the tax payers who are funding our research. These results and the past successes of the IFF have been and are accounted for in terms of actual scientific discoveries and publications, patents and licenses to industry, or training of people and their transfer to high level positions in industry and at universities. However we want to clearly state and reiterate here that most of these accomplishments are a product of the scientific freedom and stimulating environment at the IFF, but not due to strategic planning at some government agency or ministry. At times, when the federal government is threatening to curb our scientific freedom by introducing socialistic planning structures, this is a grave concern of all of us at the IFF. Technological advances can be planned, and then implemented at a huge cost of capital and manpower, as the semiconductor and computer industry has demonstrated with their road maps. True innovation and inventions as well as novel scientific discoveries are not plannable, rather they are the result of a stimulating and nurturing atmosphere where creativity wins over long term planning. Incidentally, the discovery of the GMR sensors has obliterated and significantly changed the carefully and strategically planned advances in magnetic data storage. These are the true innovations that only basic science and the curious minds of creative scientists can deliver, thus enabling our society to face the social, environmental, and technological challenges of the future and to compete in the global marketplace in the long term.
" He whose generals are able and not interfered with by the sovereign will be victorious"
Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", China 500 B.C.
Wolfgang Eberhardt
IFF Managing Director, 2000