The European Physical Journal - Special Topics 177(2009)
'Advances in the Multi-Scale Computational Design of Condensed Matter Interfaces'

Editorial - Materials have become an ever more important factor in most advanced technologies. It was no coincidence when the former State Secretary Christoph Matschie stated, at the opening of WING (Materials Innovations for Industry and Society initiated by the German Ministry for Education and Research), that nearly any new product is based on the improvement of an engineered material. This comes along with a constant quest for new materials, improved performance and decreased development costs. This quest is particularly strong for high-wage countries in the global market situation. Thus there is a steadily growing importance of systematic materials development supported by computer simulation methods in tailoring new materials for more and more specific demands for a wide range of applications from everyday household goods to opto-electronics and even further to medicine. In this context the tailoring of materials interfaces, respectively that of corresponding condensed matter systems, often used as model systems for the first ones, plays a particularly important role. The reason for this is that a material’s functional properties are to a large extent determined by its inner and outer interfaces. Prominent examples are corrosion-resistant surfaces of household goods, or likewise inert surfaces of prostheses engineered for medical applications. During materials processing the inner and outer interfaces of such functional materials evolve driven by the complex interplay of all the physical and chemical mechanisms contributing to interface energetics, interface kinetics and interface dynamics. Essentially, this opens a multiscale problem ranging from the quantum mechanical to the continuum scale.