The North American Users meeting was hosted by UC Irvine on 19th October and was attended by a good turnout of 42 Users from 18 institutes. The meeting was opened by Dave Surman with welcome to the meeting and an overview of the Surface Business group activities since the last meeting. Following that Chris Moffitt presented 'AXIS technology - tuning and consequences for quantification' which was the first contribution to the session relating to quantitative analysis using XPS. The session was continued by Dr Fernandez who presented 'XPS analysis without transmission function using a Kratos instrument' detailing work that has been undertaken with both his AXIS Nova and AXIS Ultra spectrometers. Kratos Applications specialist, Dr Counsell presented 'Using Ag La excitation source for high energy XPS' as an introduction to the presentation from Dr Shard of NPL 'XPS intensity calibration and sensitivity factors for Ag L(alpha) sources' which detailed results from the Innovate UK joint project between Kratos Analytical, Teer Coatings and NPL. The technology session was completed by our User from the Wiezmann Institute, Dr Cohen, who presented his current research 'CREM: electrical measurements in and by the XPS'.
The post-lunch session was started by Dr Hedhili from KAUST who presented an interesting talk 'characterisation of nanomaterials using XPS'. Dr Coultas from Kratos Analytical gave an update on 'Databases, e-spectra & software roadmap' from Kratos which lead to fruitful discussion and User feedback on what our Users want from their software. After this, the attendees were split into two groups for the workshop element of the meeting. The first group we able to a visit the AXIS Supra in lab for a demonstration of the instrument and an overview of the capabilities of a modern, state-of-the-art Kratos Instrument. The second group spent their time in an ESCApe and Vision2 data processing practical session, allowing them to pick the brains of our applications specialists with specific data processing challenges they had faced with their own data.
The day was rounded off by dinner at North Italia which proved to be a good end to an excellent meeting.