Author Archives: Nicholas

Just back from a week sequestered in the Newark Hilton, testifying in a patent litigation. More on the trial later, but suffice to say, it has been a real awakening. Lawyers work a lot harder than chemists, I can certainly… Continue reading →

There were a number of requests for an index of the proceedings of the Kanazawa meeting. The organizers have gone to a great effort to produce this product. It will be very very useful. The link is either here or… Continue reading →

Castner, Ratner et al. have just published an important paper that discriminates amongst different cell types at the single cell level. They used C60 etching to remove the overlayer junk from the lawn of cells, and principle component analysis to… Continue reading →

There is a nice review article (DOI: 10.1021/ac203126f) summarizing many of the most important techniques for characterizing phospholipid films on solid supports. The SIMS technique gets some nice press with the following statement: “Imaging mass spectrometry allows label-free detection of… Continue reading →

There is a thought provoking work published this week resulting from a collaboration between AMOLF in the Netherlands and PNNL where C60-SIMS has been coupled to a high performance FTMS. The mass resolution and accuracy are just what you would… Continue reading →

The installation has gone smoothly. Only a few vacuum leaks, a loose circuit board and a loose wire or 2. Gavyn, Andy and Paul have come and gone, so we are on our own now. Our first attempt is the… Continue reading →

What a mess!… Continue reading →

The first week of activity has gone quite smoothly. A few leaky flanges, and a few stage issues, but the machine is under vacuum, and producing great secondary electron images with less than 300 nm spatial resolution. The vibration isolation… Continue reading →