Surfaces: a playground for physics with broken symmetry in reduced dimensionality

With our crystal ball in front of us, we attempt to articulate the opportunities and challenges for a surface physicist in the beginning of the now millennium. The challenge is quite clear: to use the unique environment of a surface or interface to do fascinating physics, while taking full advantage of the skills the community has developed over the last 30 years. The opportunities appear to be endless! In this age of Nanotechnology where the promise is to shape the world atom by atom, leading to the next industrial revolution [Nano technology: shaping the world atom by atom, National Science and Technology Council, Committee on Technology, 1999], surface science should be at the very forefront of both technological and scientific advances. The smaller objects become, the more important their surfaces become. In this article we focus on the role of a surface physicist in the emergence of nanoscale collective phenomena in complex materials. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.