July 2010

Alex Shard, Jian Wang and Steve Spencer have won the NPL Rayleigh Award for their paper, "XPS topofactors: determining overlayer thickness on particles and fibres", published in Surface and Interface Analysis.

Many interesting samples for surface analysis are not flat. Although there have been a number of general discussions of the topic and some numerical methods which can deal with individual cases there have been very few examples of simple and practical solutions to this common problem. This paper extends an approach developed previously at NPL for flat samples to curved samples and will be of great interest to industrial users of XPS.