In 1986, before computers were inexpensive, 3.5 inch floppies held only 1.5 Mb, hard disks were 5-10 Mb in size, and expensive ($1,000-$2,000) I envisioned making this spectra-base while I was working in Tokyo as a demo sales engineer selling monochromatic XPS systems (SSI S-Probe from USA) to large corporations and universities from 1986 until 1999 when I returned to the USA. I imagined selling hard disks filled with XPS data and a software to process those spectra. I realized then the extreme value of having chemical state information from the top 10 nm.

 

I started to make high quality high energy resolution spectra from pure chemical compounds, pure metals, pure polymers, fresh bulk of semiconductor wafers, exposed bulk of natural crystals and any commonly available pure binary and ternary chemical compounds.

 

At each company I worked I asked and got permission to continue to collect such reference spectra.

 

In  2015 after leaving California I joined a laser company and began to buy, using personal money, single crystals as well as more pure commonplace chemical compounds.  Then in the evenings I used a Thermo K alpha+ to collect high quality self-consistent complete sets of spectra because that is the information I need to help customers.  NIST BEs are effectively unreliable, but I made histograms to help others to see why they are not so useful.

 

For 35 years I collected all sorts of XPS reference spectra while working at different industrial companies and contract labs.  I have never worked at a university.  I never received free money from any government or my company.  I have only used my personal money.

 

I love XPS and know how useful it is.  I also know that none of the reference journals, including SSS from AVS, produce any self-consistent reliable sets of data with reliable energy referencing and with only one transmission function.

 

As a 40 yr expert in XPS application in the real world, I had to learn many things.  How to make good data-sets.  How to make good charge referencing, how to prepare samples using common lab methods without gloveboxes, and more.

 

In retirement at age 68, I decided to build this website.  It took 2 years to build and to populate with spectra, overlays, tables, tests of sfs, etc.

 

I never intended to provide either of my websites free of charge because I am spending my retirement money, not the government money.  I asked for Donations from on-line visitors for 2 years, but no one donated any money.  

 

No one has commented or complimented about the quality and easy use Periodic Table design that I invented.