For more frequently asked questions or to ask a question of your own please visit the NEXUS forum.
We encourage you to publish results obtained with NEXUS assistance. We will give you as much help as we can to do this. If you publish a paper or thesis, or give a conference presentation using data obtained at NEXUS please let us know using our simple webform. If you do use results from us please acknowledge NEXUS as follows:
X-ray photoelectron spectra were obtained at the National EPSRC XPS User's Service (NEXUS) at Newcastle University, an EPSRC Mid-Range Facility.
Newcastle University has accommodation for visiting researchers, at Carlton Lodge and Windsor Place. Each is five minutes walk from NEXUS and 10 minutes walk from Haymarket Metro station and Northumberland Street, Newcastle's main shopping area. You can book by filling-in an online form, but you should do so at least 7 days in advance.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/accommodation/staff/
NEXUS has no budget to pay for accommodation or travel (instead we have invested in web-based remote-access XPS facilties). Nevertheless you are very welcome to visit us.
A: Its your choice. You are very welcome to visit and take XPS spectra “hands on”, subject to proper training and provided we know you’re coming at least a week in advance. You may wish to send samples, which is also fine.
You can visit at any time (though if you really want to do so in the middle of the night you may have a stiff risk assessment form to fill in first).
A very powerful approach is to send samples, and then discuss the data as it is being acquired using web conferencing to show the spectra from the XPS instrument on your PC screen as it appears in real time, and discuss the next steps by telephone as it happens. We even pay the phone call charges. NEXUS has these web conferencing facilities today, and will be greatly expanding them in the coming months to allow remote *operation* of many instrument functions, not just remote viewing.
There is excellent advice on sample preparation in ISO Standards BSI ISO 18116:2005 "Surface chemical analysis - Guidelines for preparation and mounting of specimens for analysis" and BSI ISO 18117:2009 "Surface chemical analysis - Handling of specimens prior to analysis".
A: We would of course like to put copies of these documents on the NEXUS website, but copyright rules mean we cannot. You should be able to get copies easily through your university library.
If you have any queries about sample preparation feel free to contact us: nexus@ncl.ac.uk
A: NEXUS is based at two sites, one at Newcastle University ("NEXUS North") and the other at a former ICI laboratory at Wilton on Teeside ("NEXUS South"). Day-to-day management is by Professor Peter Cumpson at Newcastle, and Professor Ian Fletcher at Wilton.
Amongst many other achievements in a long career in XPS and SIMS Professor Fletcher was part of Professor David Brigg's ICI group that purchased the Scienta ESCA300 spectrometer in 1988, a state-of-the-art instrument in its time. Ian used this at Wilton until ICI donated it to Daresbury to found XPS capability there in 1993. The ICI group purchased some of the first instruments in each subsequent generation of XPS technology, including the VG ESCAscope, the first parallel-imaging XPS, and then the generation of magnetic immersion lens instruments such as the Kratos Axis Ultra. Professor Fletcher has published widely, and made ICI spectrometers available for access to academic work through extremely successful EPSRC funded instrument access projects such as ESCA300 access in 1990/91 and ToF SIMS access in 1998 - judged as "Excellent in management and use of resources" in the project's final assessment.
Professor Cumpson worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) for over 20 years, starting on a VG ESCALAB II instrument in Dr Martin Seah's group there. He wrote what is still probably the only software that allows one to calibrate XPS intensities traceably to the SI system based on NPL measurements, and published some key work in Angle-Resolved XPS and Monte Carlo simulation of XPS electron mtransport, some of these publications cited hundreds of times. He also wrote and made freely-available the "ARCtick" software for mnondestructive depth-profiling from Angle-Resolved XPS data.
Newcastle University is a member of the Russell Group, the association of the 20 leading research-intensive UK universities. 'World leading' or 'internationally recognised' research was identified in all of our submitted subject areas by the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, and we are ranked 17th in the UK for research power (according to "Research Fortnight"). Newcastle University recently gained EPSRC Framework Status, limited to the top 12 UK universities in terms of research funding from EPSRC.
To contact either Professor Cumpson or Professor Fletcher please send email to: nexus@ncl.ac.uk