This book is t e fifth in aseries of scientific textbooks designed to
cover advances in selected research fields from a basic and general
view- point. The reader is taken carefully but rapidly through the
introductory material in order that t e significance of recent
developments can be understood with only limited initial knowledge. The
inclusion in the Appendix of the abstracts of many of the more important
papers in the field provides further assistance for the non-specialist,
and acts as aspringboard to supplementary reading for those who wish to
consult the original liter- ature. Surface analysis has been the subject
of numerous books and review articles, and the fundamental scientific
principles of t e more popular techniques are now reasonably weIl
established. This book is concerned with the very powerful techniques of
Auger electron and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (AES and XPS), with
an emphasis on how they may be performed as part of a modern analytical
facility. Since the development of AES and XPS in the late 1960s and
early 1970s there have been great strides forward in the sensitivities
and resolutions of the instrumentation. Simultaneously, these
spectroscopies have undergone a veritable explosion, both in their
acceptance alongside more routine ana1ytical techniques and in the range
of problems and materials to which they are applied. As a result, many
researchers in industry and in academia now come into contact with AES
and XPS not as specialists, but as users.