An international symposium was organized by the 141st Committee on Microbeam Analysis of JSPS, during December 6th (Sun.) – 11th (Fri.), 2009, at the Westin Maui Resort & Spa, Maui, Hawaii, USA. The number of participants were 224 [152 from Japan, 72 non-Japanese (23 from Germany; 16 from USA; 4 each from Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden; 3 from Korea and France, 2 from Belgium, New Zealand, Poland, and Spain; 1 from Australia, Canada, Czech, Hong Kong, The Netherlands, Portugal, and UK] and 46 accompanying persons.

Representative participants were G. A. Somorjai (University of California at Berkeley), H. Ibach (Research Center Jülich), N. Winograd (Penn State University), W.-D. Schneider (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne), H.-J. Freund (Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society), D.E. Newbury (National Institute of Standards and Technology), B. J. Griffin (The University of Western Australia), H. Lichte (Technische Universität Dresden), E. Bauer (Arizona State University), C. S. Fadley (University of California, Davis / LBNL), and many other outstanding researchers.

Total budget was 15,136 kYen including 1,000 kY (fiscal year 2008) and 2,500 kY (fiscal year 2009) as one of the JSPS Symposium Projects, and 500 kY as one of the JSPS Publication Projects of the fiscal year 2009.

As the representative of JSPS, Prof. M. Kobayashi (Nobel Laureate 2008) gave a plenary talk on his own quark theory, including experiments which proved the theory. This talk attracts great interest of the participants.

Tutorial, plenary, invited, and contributed talks and poster presentations were all outstanding. Among them, 9 excellent students were awarded the student prize to support their travel expenses. The statistics and classification of presentations are listed in Table 1.

Prof.G. A. Somorjai, famous for his catalyst research, and Prof. H. Ibach, famous for his high resolution electron spectrometer, were awarded the JSPS 141 Prize, becoming honorary members of the 141 committee.

Parcels sent from Japan did not come to the conference venue in time. The effort of Westin as well as all the organizing committee members finally made it possible to get the parcels on Thursday morning.

The proceedings of the present symposium have been published as a 736-page book, and electronic copy is published in the Web, and distributed by USB memories during the conference. Excellent papers among these proceedings will be reproduced after referee process in a special issue of Surface & Interface Analysis from Wiley, UK, as well as the e-Journal of Surface Science and Nanotechnology from the Surface Science Society of Japan.

Thanks are due to those companies supported the conference through the sponsors’ session or exhibition.

Next ALC will be held in May 2011 at Seoul, Korea, co-organized by IUMAS (International Union of Microbeam Analysis Societies).