November 1, 2016 NPL’s Caterina Minelli delivered the invited talk in the “Advances for Complicated Sample Preparation Strategies” session at the 63rd meeting of the American Vacuum Society (AVS), where she discussed the current challenges in particle measurements. The talk was well received, sparking further discussion in the audience, including Innanopart collaborators, which highlighted the urgent need for further guidance and standardisation. David Cant also delivered a talk in the session “Quantitative Surface Analysis: New Ways to Perform Old Tricks” detailing an innovative approach to measure the thickness of multi-coatings of nanoparticles by XPS. Of great significance is the fact that Innanopart work on nanoparticle analysis and more generally NPL’s work on XPS was mentioned by a number of speakers. Of particular interest for the community were the recent works on measuring nanoparticle coating thickness and chemical composition by XPS (Shard, J Phys Chem C 2012) which is now commonly referred to in the community as “the Shard method”, the outcomes of the closely related and subsequent VAMAS interlaboratory study (Belsey et al, J Phys Chem C 2016) and a work on XPS detection limits (Shard, Surf Interf Anal 2014).
