Extended Abstracts : 15 July, 2008

Welcome and History

Welcome

The 20^th Workshop on Rare Earth Permanent Magnets and Applications is to be held September 8-10, 2008, at MOVENPICK hotel (http://www.moevenpick-hotels.com/en/pub/your_hotels/worldmap/crete/overview.cfm) in Crete, Greece. This biannual meeting is organized under the auspices of academic and industrial partners working towards development and applications of permanent magnets based on Rare Earth-transition metals and recently on other PM phases.

It is with great pleasure that we invite you to attend the 20^th REPM08 to be held in the place where history says that the first PM was discovered by Magnes in the foot-hills of mount Ida, Heraklion, Crete, Greece 3 milleniums ago.

REPM08 is jointly sponsored by the Greek Physical Society.

History

The first of the series took place during 1966 in Dayton, OH, USA and has been followed by similar, highly regarded, conferences held in various parts of the world. This is the 20^th anniversary since the birth of rare earth magnets in 1967.

During the past four decades rare earth magnets were developed as global industry and business from their basic researches in laboratory. Today the commercial magnets can be manufactured with larger scale and widely used in most modern industries, high-technology fields. The magnets are playing an important role in our daily life. The rare-earth deposits today are located in China, Australia, Russia and US.

In the last years the production of rare-earth based magnets is shifted to China, where multinational and local companies have invested heavily on research on rare earth permanent magnetic materials, as well as for large scale investment on production equipment improvement. China has possessed the largest production capacity and application market for rare earth magnets in the world. There exist also companies in Europe specializing in high quality products and applications with a smaller share in the global market. Quality of rare earth magnets made in China is approaching to the global highest level.