Soft Magnetic Materials 21 Conference Chair´s Foreword

The 21st Soft Magnetic Materials Conference (SMM 21) was held from September 1–4, 2013 in Budapest, Hungary. The conference was organized by Wigner Centre for Physics, Institute for Solid State Physics, under the patronage of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This biannual conference series, first established in 1973, provides a forum for discussion on properties and applications of soft magnets through a broad range of topics such as electric steels, amorphous and nanocrystalline alloys, low field magnetocaloric and ferromagnetic shape memory alloy, and so on. Soft magnets have become a key component in a large variety of electrical and electronic devices and have also gained a significant commercial relevance.