The 10th International conference on the Physics of Highly Charged Ions, the "HCI-2000", took place at the Clark Kerr Campus in Berkeley, California, USA, from July 30 through August 3, 2000. The conference, which was attended by over 170 participants from 19 countries, was organized by the American Vacuum Society (AVS) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The "HCI-2000" conference covered various fields in physics where highly charged ions play an important role. In particular HCI production, structure and interaction with matter are examples of important impact areas. This was reflected through the major topics of the conference:

HCI-Surfaces, HCI-Cluster, HCI-Collisions, Recombination, Plasma Spectroscopy, HCI-Fragmentation, New Traps, Laser Production of HCI, and HCI Spectroscopy

These topics were covered through an intense program including 2 plenary lectures, 11 invited lecturers, 25 oral contributions, and 200 posters. A welcome address was presented by W. Goldstein (Associate Director of Physics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and an informal evening was spent during the dinner cruise on the S.F. bay. The presentations showed an impressive array of instrumental advances consisting of ion sources, accelerators, storage rings and ion traps as well as sophisticated detector technology. Their application was demonstrated through excellent contributions from advanced studies of interaction phenomena of highly charged ions with matter. The fundamental physics based on the reported new data allowed speculation on possible applications of highly charged ions in other fields of science and technology.

This is the trend of the HCI conferences, which have incorporated and emphasized different areas of physics. Instrumental aspects like ion source and detector development were discussed in view of possible application in nano-science. Here the understanding of the interaction dynamics of HCIs with complex systems is essential. V