There’s more to ToF-SIMS: a journey exploring mass spectra   

Abstract:
ToF-SIMS data has the potential to unravel precise information difficult, if not impossible, to obtain using other techniques. Characterizing the chemical bonding, as well as diffusion at the interface of dissimilar materials joined by laser welding is one example. Assemblies of polyamide-6.6 and aluminum have been studied in those aspects. Morphological information, such as crystallization, can be obtained using ToF-SIMS. Surfaces of NPB have been studied and show that amorphous and crystallized area do not present the same mass spectra and can be discriminated. The use of matrices like in MALDI-ToF has been explored and show that solvent alone can be a good way to increase the signal of analytes. In all these cases, the use of statistical tools has proven to be crucial to better understand the data acquired.
At last, nanoprojectile-SIMS or NP-SIMS is still a very niche technique within the SIMS community, but it has the potential to be the groundbreaking technique for the characterization of more and more complex materials. It also has the potential to explore the very fundamentals of the interaction between the projectile, C60 in our case, and the analyte. Therefore, native flat surfaces have been studied to explore a new detector augmenting even more the possibilities of this technique.