Dear colleagues,

We regret to inform you that, with deep concerns for global public health, our organizing committee has decided to postpone the 5^th International Conference of Matter and Radiation at Extremes (ICMRE2020) to the year of 2021, and detailed arrangement will be announced later.

During the last 5 months or so, we have been making positive efforts preparing for a conference of high academic value, carefully selecting highlighted topics, inviting eminent plenary speakers, arranging sessions, as well as doing all sorts of tasks necessary for a successful conference. We were confident that we Chinese have the courage and ability to successfully contain COVID 19 and can go through the unexpected epidemic soon, thus we can go on hosting ICMRE2020 on the planned date.

However, we are very worried now since there is COVID 19 pandemic world widely, and the whole world is suffering and things are getting worse day by day. Drastic impact of the pandemic is now spreading quickly, and many big events have been forced to cancel. On March 24, the International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee made the joint decision to postpone Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games in Tokyo due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Being aware of the seriousness of the situation and still determined to promote international progress of research about matter at radiation at extremes, we reached the decision to postpone the conference to next year.

As we all know how destructive the COVID 19 is to human beings, we do hope wholeheartedly that people in infected areas can take good care of themselves and all the global strengths and abilities, governmental and nongovernmental, public as well as private, will collaborate effectively; we wish people all over the world will fight together to expel or kill the viruses and win back our safe and prosperous environment. Especially, we wish all our attendees and will- be attendees of ICMRE be in quite good health in the coming year.

We sincerely ask for your understanding of the postponement and looking forward to meeting everyone of you next year!

Sincerely yours,

General Chair of ICMRE2020

Weiyan Zhang, Jean-Luc Miquel

Local Chair of ICMRE2020

Jianguo Wang