Links to Surface, Thin Film and Microscopy groups

• Links at Queen Mary College, London, UK, include a worldwide listing of both Surface science research groups and teaching resources. These, and other worldwide links, can be reached from this site at Surface web sites and data bases.
• Links on this site to STM groups and images.
• Links on this site to Electron-optical groups.
• Surface Engineering is a field which has commercial opportunities. Surface Web was a commercial database and information exchange, specializing on coatings and powder technology. It is now being transformed into a part of CA Technology (CAT), but at the moment I am not much wiser for my surfing. Time will tell, or I will remove this item.

Links to Surface analysis groups and service companies using AES, SAM and related techniques

• All AES/SAM analyses use an energy analyzer, which can be obtained from one of several companies. One such is the Concentric Hemispherical Analyzer (CHA) from VSW in the UK which we have used in Arizona.
• Many Universities have centralized their surface analysis facilities,to maximize accessibility and throughput, as for example the Center for Microanalysis of Materials at the University of Illinois (UIUC), which includes AES and SAM. Several Universities have set up combined academic/ commercial units, such as Bristol University's Interface Analysis Centre or Loughborough University's Materials Characterisation Centre in the UK.
• Industrial surface analyical laboratories and consultancies have grown substantially over the past decade. The best known in the USA is undoubtedly Charles Evans and Associates which now has in addition East coast, Midwest and two Asian operations, seemingly swallowing up other firms, such as Physical Electronics Inc(PHI) and Surface Science Laboratories en route. A 1995 series of tutorials including AES was prepared by Ron Fleming of the then C.A. Evans, Inc. in association with NSF, which includes some spectra and nice graphics. Some other links are available on this site.
• Explanations of the terminology and acronyms of surface analysis can be found at various society and commercial sites. Check out the comprehensive list of acronyms, maintained by the Surface Analysis Forum and/or the Handbook of Analytic Methods maintained by Materials Evaluation and Engineering Inc, which includes AES and SAM.
• The National laboratories (e.g. NIST and NPL) have databases on particular topics. For example, NIST now has three databases available for applications in AES and XPS. Version 3.0 of their XPS database (SRD 20) is available for online access and is free. Version 2.0 of the Electron Elastic-Scattering Cross-Section Database (SRD 64) was released in April, 2000, and Version 1.0 of the Electron Inelastic-Mean-Free-Path Database (SRD 71) in September, 1999; an enhanced version of the latter database (Version 1.1) has been released more recently. The latter two databases are available without charge on request to NIST.

Links to Nano-fabrication groups in Materials science

• One of the groups producing spectacular images is the IBM Almaden Lab in California, with STM pictures of the Fe/Cu quantum corral. This is just one example of the ability of probe microscopies to manipulate atoms on surfaces. Several of the STM groups listed on this site are also involved in this effort.
• There is however, even more interest in techniques which can assemble patterns by parallel processing, and several efforts are underway, e.g. at the Nanofabrication center at Cornell University, but the name has recently been changed to the Cornell NanoScale Facility (CNF) These and other activities now come under the general heading of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, which are featured on these pages as Nanotechnology is everywhere!
• Conferences on related topics have sprouted everywhere. In 2003, you can catch up with the CNF at the Annual Meeting & Career Fair in Ithaca, New York, in September. The Gordon Research Conference on the Chemistry and Physics of Nanostructure Fabrication in New Hampshire in July, 2000, and this series was continued in 2002; it is scheduled for 2004 (July 18-23). In 2001 you could have tried Nano-Physics & Bio-Electronics - A new Odyssey held at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in August, and/or the NanoBioTech Congress in Muenster, Germany, in September 2002 and 2003. These titles are going to drive us all crazy, sooner rather than later.
• Several firms, including Symyx are experimenting with Combinatorial materials discovery, a group of techniques designed to find optimum compositions of ternary or quaternary thin film materials via parallel processing of addressable micro-arrays. One can follow the progress of these firms, and their continuing need for venture capital, in the financial press. This one is growing fast, and has some heavyweight scientists on board; but the transition to a regular business is a rocky road, and there are bound to be some casualties.

Links to Micro-array technology groups in Biochemistry

• An area which links microscopy and microanalysis in biochemistry is the fast developing field of high precision arrayer machines. The Pat Brown group at Stanford first demonstrated the biochemical potential of these instruments, and has made results, designs and software available on the web.
• There are now many competing academic/medical/goverment lab groups, including the University of Pennsylvania and Lawrence Livermore Lab, all interested in gene-sequencing and the Human genome project. In 2000, the commercial CeleraScience group decoded the Drosophila genome and planned to beat the publicly funded genome guys to the post on the Human genome too. Read about it in the March 24th 2000 issue of Science Magazine. Correction! They did so plan until they patched up their differences, and made a joint statement in the summer of 2000. Science by Press Release. Now that a huge wall chart (February 16, 2001) is free online, has been given out to all subscribers to Science, and I have seen my friends put it up on their lab walls, I guess we now have to figure out a) whether it is correct; b) whether it is general, or just applies to you know who, and/or c) what it all means. This story will run and run.
• Instrument companies, such as Affymetrix and Genetix, manufacture and improve robotic microarray systems for a very competitive marketplace.