Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry - SIMS XI

Editors: Greg Gillen, Richard Lareau, Joe Bennett and Fred Stevie

Preliminary Preface to the SIMS XI Conference Proceedings - Publication Date March-April 1998. John Wiley and Sons.

This volume contains 252 contributions presented as plenary, invited and contributed poster and oral presentations at the 11th International Conference on Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS XI) held at the Hilton Hotel, Walt Disney World Village, Orlando, Florida, September 7-12, 1997. The conference was sponsored by the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and was held in conjunction with the 10th Annual Workshop on SIMS. The biennial SIMS conference series is the premier international forum covering recent developments in secondary ion mass spectrometry. Over 430 scientists from 27 countries attended SIMS XI presenting over 350 oral and poster technical presentations.

The SIMS XI conference was organized with several goals in mind. First, we wanted the technical program to serve as a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art of the technique while at the same time emphasizing the diversity in applied and fundamental research being conducted by the SIMS community. Holding the 10th Annual Workshop in conjunction with SIMS XI also gave us the opportunity to include technical presentations of a more basic and tutorial nature, and to adopt the relaxed atmosphere associated with a workshop. A second major goal for SIMS XI was to encourage participation by students and international scientists. Through the generous contributions from our corporate sponsors, and grants from the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, 16 student scholarships were awarded and all 50 student attendees were offered half price registration. We were also able to offer partial support to 31 invited speakers and assisted several Eastern European attendees in acquiring competitive travel grants to attend the conference. The third goal of the conference was to encourage increased participation of certain interest groups within the SIMS community that had been underrepresented at recent conferences. To achieve this goal, special emphasis was given in the technical program to research in biological, isotopic, and geological SIMS. Our final goal was to hold SIMS XI at a unique location that would encourage interaction between attendees in an informal and relaxed atmosphere. For this reason we selected the Hilton Hotel located within the Walt Disney World resort complex as the site for SIMS XI. Several social activities were held at SIMS XI including a welcome mixer on Sunday night, a Tuesday night banquet with special guest speakers from Disney and the final conference excursion and banquet at Disney's EPCOT center. Several instrument vendors sponsored events for the attendees including a Caribbean themed dinner hosted by Cameca and the Physical Electronics dinner held at the Pleasure Island's Adventurers Club.

The technical program for SIMS XI covered all aspects of the technique. However, certain topics were "highlighted" with special invited workshops or sessions that were partially programmed before abstracts were received. Highlighted sessions included isotopic and geological analysis, advances in biological SIMS, advanced characterization of semiconductors, practical TOF SIMS, fundamentals of molecular desorption and SIMS instrumentation. Workshops were held on standards for SIMS, ultra shallow depth profiling and practical SIMS analysis. A special one day workshop on biological SIMS was held prior to the main conference and a chemometrics short course was held in conjunction with the meeting. A number of major instrument manufacturers also conducted users group meetings throughout the week.

We are very excited about the quality and diversity of the manuscripts contained in this book. New applications of SIMS are being pursued in a number of areas with an increased emphasis on the biological sciences and organic surface characterization. This interest is being driven to a large extent by the rapid growth of TOF-SIMS. Isotopic and geological SIMS continue to be active areas of research with contributions ranging from the analysis of Martian meteorites to nuclear particles. A number of papers were submitted dealing with polyatomic primary ions showing clear benefits for increasing desorption yields of molecular species and for depth profiling applications. In the depth profiling area, the existing benchmarks for detection limits and depth resolution continue to be redefined with a great deal of work being focused on ultra shallow depth profiling. The development and improvement of SIMS instrumentation was another topic area for which we received a number of submissions. At the same time, we observed a continued and growing emphasis on fundamental aspects of SIMS including mechanisms of sputtering and ion formation, sputter induced topography, atomic mixing, the nature of the transient region and mechanisms of molecular desorption.

A number of individuals and organizations contributed to the organization of SIMS XI. We would like to give special thanks to our co-organizers, Joe Bennett and Fred Stevie. Their contributions, particularly in the area of fundraising, were critically important to the success of this conference. Pete Kahora and Jan Chabala did a great job in organizing the poster sessions and took responsibility for facilitating the technical review of a significant portion of the technical program. Rick Hervig and Subhash Chandra receive our gratitude for being the most efficient sessions chairs, with special mention to Rick for obtaining a large NSF grant. Our SIMS XI Conference coordinator, Judith Sjoberg and her associate Kim Leibman did a fantastic job managing the details of the conference. Their professionalism and attention to detail were appreciated by all the attendees and were evident in the smooth operation of the conference. We would like to acknowledge all the oral session chairs for their efforts in developing a first class technical program. These individuals, along with the poster session chairs, provided more than 500 technical reviews of the manuscripts in this book and did so before the deadline! Special thanks also to Mark Wood, Matt Ervin, Sonya Roberson, Nancy Ervin, Jennifer McKinley and Maggie Puga-Lambers for their help with registration, manuscript reviews and other conference functions. We would also like to acknowledge Prof. A. Benninghoven and Dr. H. Werner and the other members of the International SIMS Organizing Committee for giving us the opportunity to organize and host this conference. Finally, we would like to thank our wives, Shirley Gillen and Gwen Lareau and our families for their support and understanding during the busy period leading up to and following SIMS XI.

The original SIMS XI WWW Pages can be found here.

SIMS XI Organizing Committee