During the last ten years, the International Winterschools on Electronic Properties of New Materials (IWEPNM) have developed into a well-established institution and the alumni form a very active interdisciplinary community which spreads all over the world. Past schools of this series have treated such topics as conducting polymers and high temperature superconductors. The present volume contains the proceedings of the fourth school on fullerenes and fullerene derivatives. Soccer-ball molecules, like C₆₀, C₇₀, etc., have been discovered in the late 1980's and are now regarded as the third allotrope of carbon (in addition to the classic allotropes graphite and diamond). By now, more than ten thousand original papers on fullerene have been published, and the present proceedings give a snap-shot of the development of the field and the state of the art, as reflected by research papers, overviews, and tutorial lectures. Highlights are contributions on fullerene polymers, magnetic properties of fullerene complexes, endohedral compounds, fullerenes with incorporated heteroatoms, and on fullerene nanotubes (single-walled, multi-walled, with open cores or metal-filled), as well as prospects of technological applications (field emission electron guns for flat video displays, fullerene plasma for vapour deposited diamond and SiC film, etc.).
