Although many phenomena observed in granular materials are still not yet fully understood, important contributions have been made to further our understanding using modern tools from statistical mechanics, micro-mechanics, and computational science.These modern tools apply to disordered systems, phase transitions, instabilities or intermittent behavior and the performance of discrete particle simulations.>> Until now, however, many of these results were only to be found scattered throughout the literature. Physicists are often unaware of the theories and results published by engineers or other fields - and vice versa.The journal Granular Matter thus serves as an interdisciplinary platform of communication among researchers of various disciplines who are involved in the basic research on granular media. It helps to establish a common language and gather articles under one single roof that up to now have been spread over many journals in a variety of fields. Notwithstanding, highly applied or technical work is beyond the scope of this journal.