Dr Michael Wiedenbeck from the SIMS Laboratory at the Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ-Potsdam, Germany) will be conducting:

3 (three) 2-day courses in
.    Cape Town
.    Port Elizabeth and
.    Johannesburg and

5 (five)1-hour lectures in
.    Cape Town
.    Port Elizabeth
.    Bloemfontein
.    Johannesburg and
.    Pretoria.

These courses and lectures will be hosted through AEON, as part of a GFZ-AEON initiative through the German-South Africa collaborative earth and space systems programme Inkaba yeAfrica.  Note attached flyer and registration form (free of charge).

AEON will be setting up a virtual SIMS* laboratory in South Africa. This will be a unique facility as it will be the only virtual SIMS laboratory in the world. Positioning this facility in South Africa will mean that African scientists will have more exposure and easier access to the SIMS technique. The first step in creating the laboratory is to create awareness. Therefore, these introductory courses and lectures aim to achieve two outcomes. Firstly, to introduce students and researchers to the SIMS technique and secondly to identify future collaborations between African researchers and the Virtual SIMS Laboratory.

*SIMS:  Ion microprobes, also know as secondary ion mass spectrometers (SIMS), use a finely focused ion beam to probe a selected sample domain. A small percentage of the material sputtered from the polished surface of the sample is ionized, and these ions are accelerated into a mass spectrometer where they are separated according to their mass-over-charge ratio. An important characteristic of SIMS is its high sensitivity compared to other microbeam sampling techniques: the ability to count individual ions results in detection limits in the parts-per-billion range for many elements. Also the fact that ions derived from the sample are separated by their mass-over-charge ratio means that isotopic analyses can be performed on very small sample volumes.

Please refer to the SIMS Brochure and Registration Form

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