Symposium A provides a forum for researchers applying atomic scale computations to industrial problems, and allows experimentalists to address the computational materials science community on their requirements for atomic scale modelling and simulation. Although the areas of application for atomic scale computation are diverse, the underlying principles, algorithms and techniques are similar.

Materials and process simulation on atomic scale is currently a reality, rather than a domain of purely academic investigations. It is now routinely used in industrial R&D in materials design, processing, and chemical synthesis. For this symposium we seek submissions with application of atomic scale materials design to:

• Microelectronics and Optoelectronics
• Nanotechnology and Biotechnology
• Fine Chemicals
• Polymers
• Drug Design

New computer aided design tools springing from computational materials science, physics and chemistry are being applied to reduce design cycle times and to eliminate costly design by trial and error within material oriented industries. Thus, Symposium A will explore the means by which quantum Monte Carlo, ab initio quantum chemistry, density-functional theories and beyond, tight binding techniques, forcefield-based molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations, molecular modelling, and mesoscale modelling are being applied to technology problems related to materials design and characterisation. We seek applications of atomic scale computation to:

• Solids, liquids, gases
• Surfaces and interfaces
• Molecules and clusters
• Catalysis
• Biological molecules, macromolecules, polymers
• Plasmas, chemical vapor deposition, atomic layer deposition, and materials processing
• Nanostructures

We also seek submissions discussing advances in electronic structure theory, which enable new problems to be investigated.

Please also consider joining us at the next symposium with similar focus during the E-MRS 2002 Fall Meeting at the end of August 2002. This symposium incporporates the same group of people who are running the www.AtomicScaleDesign.Net discussion forum and web site. Fall Symposium G will be complimentary to the current one an will stress software and tool development, and will further expand topics presented here.