The development of SIMS and international SIMS conferences: a personal retrospective view

Today SIMS is a well-established and widely applied surface analytical technique, featuring the many unique properties of mass spectrometry. It is successfully applied to virtually all kinds of solid materials, for bulk and thin layer as well as for surface analysis. The fast development of SIMS started in the late 1950s and continues until today. It has been characterized by a number of key developments, which include the control of ion yields by the application of selected atomic and molecular or cluster ions, the development of high-performance instrumentation by the development of special operation modes, and several attempts to understand and predict the secondary ion formation processes. Starting in 1977, these developments have been accompanied by and mirrored in the series of international SIMS conferences. The development of the technique as well as the conference series and their strong interaction is described in a pronounced personal retrospective view. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.