This volume contains summaries of lectures and contributed papers delivered at an International Summer School on "Dynamical Phenomena at Surfaces, I nterfaces and Superl atti ces" hel d at the Ettore Maj orana Centre for Sci en- tific Culture, Erice (Sicily), Italy, July 1-13, 1984. The School was orga- ni zed under the auspi ces of the Surfaces and Interfaces Secti on of the Condensed Matter Division of the European Physical Society as the sixth course in the series on Materials Science and Technology. Approximately 60 parti c i pants from all regi ons of Europe, the Uni ted States, and further afield - Hong Kong, China, India - were able to take part in a program of 45 lectures and 11 contributed talks, which covered most of the solid-state aspects of the subject. In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the proper- ties of carefully prepared surfaces, interfaces, and multilayer thin films. This advance in research has received its impetus from the technological re- levance of surfaces and interfacial phenomena associated with heterogeneous catalysis, corrosion, and, particularly, new developments in microelectronics.
One of the most important developments to emerge over the past decade has been our ability to prepare ultra-thin structures at the submicron level, i. e. , to engineer low-dimensional solids at the atomic-scale level.