Guest Editorial

The Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Applications of Polar Dielectrics (ECAPD-11) that was held at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, on July 9–13, 2012, are contained in four volumes of the international journal Ferroelectrics. It was decided by the organizers to combine the ECAPD conference with two related conferences: the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Applications of Ferroelectrics (ISAF-2012) and the 4th Piezoresponse Force Microscopy and Nanoscale Phenomena in Polar Materials (PFM-2012). Because of the synergy and interplay among the attendees at the combined conferences, therewas an excellent international and interdisciplinary exchange of information between the researchers and engineers who were present from academia, government laboratories, and industry. There were more than 460 attendees from five continents, and 532 papers were presented, which included 47 invited papers and 241 oral presentations. It covered a wide range of topics including, but not limited to the processing, characterization, and applications of ferroelectric, piezoelectric, pyroelectric, dielectric, multiferroic,magnetoelectric, and other related functional materials for the twenty-first century and beyond.