Senate Building, 4th floor, room 430 Israel Technion City, Haifa, 320003 IsraelThe Solid State Institute is an interdisciplinary research center designated to house and serve scientists from various faculties who are interested in the study of solids and solid interfaces. Pure and applied research projects, some of which may ultimately be of use to industry, are being carried out at the Institute in many individual and/or collaborative research efforts. The physical proximity fosters cooperation between scientists from different disciplines and different faculties that otherwise would not take place. The academic staff comprises of about thirty faculty members from physics, electrical engineering, chemistry, and material sciences, who partially or exclusively carry out their research at the Institute. About forty graduate students from chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering are being trained in the Institute. In addition, the institute hosts several new immigrant scientists which are partially supported by the Giladi program. The Institute also hosts several postdoctoral students and short-term visitors every year. The non-academic staff includes six engineers, eight technicians, and two administrative employees. Altogether, about 100 people are active in research in the Solid State Institute. Most of the basic and applied research carried out in the Institute focuses on the study of electrical and optical properties of semiconductor materials, including diamond and quantum nanostructures made of semiconductors. In addition to the focus on optical and electrical properties of semiconductors, a large scientific effort is devoted to the fields of chemistry and physics of surfaces, interfaces, and light-emitting polymers. Thin films of diamond are produced in the diamond laboratory and are studied by optical, electrical and other physical methods, within the Solid State Institute. The Solid State Institute houses about half of the laboratories of the Optoelectronics Center, a center of excellence established by the Technion and fully supported by the New York Metropolitan chapter of the American Technion Society. Several of the Microelectronics Center laboratories are also located within the Solid State Institute building. The Institute maintains three scientific service laboratories that provide services to scientists, both in and out of the Technion. These laboratories are: the ion implantation laboratory, the surface science laboratory, and the laboratory for x-ray crystallography of thin layers.