Two weeks ago was a moment for first times for me. I had the chance to participate in my first North American conference, the North American SIMS workshop, which was a first for me. It was an excellent opportunity to connect with a lot of familiar friendly faces from the SIMS community, but also meet new ones and extend my network in the North American SIMS community. During this workshop, I was given teh opportunity to present my work on analyzing hepatic exosomes using NP-SIMS (nanoprojectile-SIMS). The work is centered on sample preparation which is always the key for good analysis. This oral presentation was awarded one of the student awards. It is a great honor to receive this award, even more because it is the first scientific award I receive. I'd like to thank all the jury member and the sponsors for it. This wouldn't have been possible without the help of my collaborators at CSUN and Mayo Clinic, and also thanks to Texas A&M postdoctoral association for the travel grant I was given to attend this event.

In our latest article, we explore the existence of a diffusion phenomenon at the interface of laser welded polymer-metal assemblies. The results show that a diffusion of the metal in the polymer actually occurs at a very small scale - about 20 nm - compared to the scale of the welding. Nonetheless, it sheds a new light on our understanding of the laser welding process, hence of the adhesion process in this case. This article was published in open access.

La Rochelle harbour by night

It is a great a pleasure to announce the publication of our latest article about the use of matrices in ToF-SIMS to analyze OLED molecules. The main conclusion of the article is that the ion yield can be enhanced just by spraying solvent on the surfaces to analyze. This opens new opportunities for material characterization. Indeed, spraying solvent is a fast, easy, and cheap methodology, hence easily transferable to many different samples. It also presents the advantage to limit the risk of mass interferences in the spectra, as the solvent evaporates before the measurements. The article also shows the investigation of the surface modification induced by the spraying of matrices/solvents on the surface topography.

Howdy !