Preface to Special Topic: 21st International Conference on Magnetism, 15-20 September 2018, San Francisco, CA, USA

The 21st International Conference on Magnetism was held 15 – 20 July 2018 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. It was only the second time that the conference has been held in the USA, having previously been hosted in San Francisco in 1985. The conference logo is presented in Figure 1.

The conference, the location for which rotates every three years to venues around the world, is administered by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). It was co-sponsored in 2018 by American Institute of Physics Publishing (represented by Bill Burke) and the IEEE Magnetics Society (represented by Rudolf Schäfer), with some additional support provided by the US Department of Energy to allow an increased number of US professionals to attend. The field of magnetics continues to be strong, as is reflected by the more than 1,540 conference registrants, including more than 490 students, who collectively delivered more than 1,900 presentations.

As with any major conference, the development of the technical program is of critical importance to ICM2018. We are deeply grateful to Program Chair, Mark Stiles, and his Associate Program Chairs, Leon Balents, Laura Heyderman and Hideo Ohno, for their tireless work to shape the program. They worked with a program committee comprising 101 scientists and engineers from around the world to shape the technical content for ICM2018.

We were delighted to open the conference with the presentation of the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal to Drs. Samuel Bader (Argonne National Laboratory), Ramamoorthy Ramesh (UC-Berkeley), and Kang Wang (UC-Los Angeles), in recognition of their many contributions to our discipline. We were also pleased to host the recognition of Drs. Wei Han (Peking University), Luqiao Liu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Shinichiro Seki (RIKEN) with the 2018 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Magnetism.

There were 4 Plenary sessions at ICM2018, delivered by Robert Buhrman (on Spin-Orbit Torques: Discoveries, Advances and Possibilities), Tomas Jungwirth (on Antiferromagnetic Spintronics), Satoru Nakatsuji (on Topological Weyl Magnets: From Multipole to Room Temperature Functions) and Nicola Spaldin (on Hidden Order in Multiferroics and Superconductors). Each of these signature sessions was very well attended and stimulated a great deal of animated discussion. There were also 4 Symposia which addressed the topics of Spin Currents and Magnonic Condensates in Magnetic Insulators, Computing with Spintronic Devices, New Routes and Materials towards Quantum Criticality, and Emerging Phenomena in Van der Waals Magnets. As is usual for ICM2018, much of the focus was on the 128 poster sessions which generated robust technical discussions. In addition, there were as many as 120 oral sessions scheduled throughout the conference to accommodate the many topics of interest.

Outside of the formal program were a number of events designed to encourage networking and professional development, including a Welcome Reception on Sunday evening and Bierstubes in the Poster and Exhibit space on three other evenings. The clear highlight was the Banquet at the fabulous San Francisco Exploratorium. There were also Pre-Conference Tutorials on Computational Micromagnetics with JOOMF, Entrepreneurship, and Resume writing. The IEEE Magnetics Society hosted a Women in Magnetism Networking Event, and two Lunch with the Experts events for student attendees.

This edition of AIP Advances marks the first time that that papers from this conference are being published in this journal, under the guidance of Guest Editor Hari Srikanth. We hope that the open access format and rapid publication will provide tangible value to the conference attendees. Thanks to Melissa Patterson and Diana Schlamadinger for making this possible. Some publications from this conference are also being published by the IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, under the guidance of Guest Editor Thomas Thomson.

On behalf of the conference steering committee we want to especially thank the team from Simply Vintage who helped organize all aspects of the conference. Conference Manager Molly Bartkowski, Abstracts and Publications Manager Regina Mohr, and Exhibits Manager Jennifer Fiske, together with their colleagues provided invaluable guidance and support to the conference. Thanks also are due to Co-Treasurers Julie Borchers and Petru Andrei, to Industry Liaison Tiffany Santos, to Publicity Chair Philip Pong, and to Tommy McKinnon of Hyperevo who managed the website.

We would like particularly to extend our thanks to everyone who attended the conference - your active participation made this conference a memorable event.