editorial

Welcome to the DIFFUSION homepage!

Occurring in essentially all types of matter, diffusion is one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in nature. The rates of a multitude of physical, chemical and biological processes are decisively influenced by diffusive mass transfer. Hence, in a large variety of technical processes, diffusion controls the production efficiency and the quality of the products. Diffusion is certainly not limited to processes in nature and technology. The phenomenon of propagation as a consequence of stochastic elementary steps has meanwhile found much interest in social sciences and economics (with the distribution of the Euros over the European countries as a most recent example).

As a consequence of the substantial interest devoted to diffusion in both fundamental research and application, there are probably few other natural phenomena that have attracted the scientific community with similar intensity: A literature search with the key word diffusion in Current Contents (Physical-Chemical-Earth-Sciences), e.g., yields an output of more than 8000 publications per year, with an increasing trend. It is not astonishing, therefore, that there are as many as close to 100 scientific journals, in which a notable fraction of articles (viz. between 5 and 20 %) deal with the different aspects of diffusion. There is, however, not a single journal, which is exclusively devoted to this phenomenon.

Judging by the above-mentioned publication number, more than 10 000 researchers may be expected to be active in the diverse fields of diffusion. The world-wide-web offers the unique chance of distributing and exchanging information among this community which otherwise would have most likely circulated within much smaller subgroups, generally determined by the systems under study and the methods applied.

As indicated on the initial page, the items of our web-site include an Online-Journal with original contributions, dealing with fundamental issues of diffusion theory, experiment and application, References and Preprints containing references and/or the full text version of some of the diffusion papers published elsewhere which the authors consider to be worth of being presented to the whole diffusion community, the news about a biennial series of Diffusion Fundamentals Conferences, bringing together all those who are interested in recent developments in diffusion theory, experiment and application offered to an interdisciplinary audience and, under the heading Diffusion News, such diverse topics of general interest for the field as Books’ announcements and reports, information about Conferences, Research Projects and Jobs. Finally there are links and tools for diverse diffusion-related matters. You are cordially invited to establish together with the Editorial Board the diffusion-fundamentals-route which we consider to be ambitious, fascinating and offering a rich harvest for the community.

Jörg Kärger Leipzig

Paul Heitjans Hannover