IUVSTA

Thin Film Division

Frank Richter

Secretary

Report to the national thin films representatives (abridged)

March 24, 2002

This is to inform you about the 90^th Executive Council Meeting of IUSTA (ECM 90) which took place in Regensburg, Germany, from March 8 to 10, 2002.

1.) The members of the Thin Film Divisional Committee as well as all other national TFD representatives who could manage it to be there assembled at March 9, 2002 for a short meeting. Participants were J.Verhoeven, J. W. Rogers, R. de Gryse and F. Richter. John Grant, the IUVSTA web editor and M. Leisch (member ICTF 12 program committee) took part as guests. We discussed the following topics:

a) Status of organisation of ICTF-12:

Jan Verhoeven as the chairman of the programme committee reported that only half of the members of the committee gave response to his request for proposals concerning the main topics of the conference as well as invited speakers. For that reason most suggested invited speakers are from Europe, only one Japanese was suggested and no Americans. Nevertheless, an attractive list of invited speakers could be established. As Jan heard from E. Majkova and  S. Luby only a few days before, everything is running well and about 20 of the tentative invited speakers have agreed yet.

b) General evaluation of ICTF series:

Independent of the special case of ICTF-12 it should be noted that the ICTF series is only one among a huge number of conferences in our field, and the number of participants has been fluctuating in the past and was quite low in some cases. We decided to ask the chairmen of the organising committees of preceding ICTF conferences about number of participants and their nationalities. With the results of this enquiry we will discuss the possible future of the next ICTF meetings in more detail on our next meeting in Bratislava (see pt. 3.).

The Swedish Vacuum society has confirmed that they will organise ICTF-13

c) Data bases:

We have discussed the task of  exchange of information on thin films, surfaces etc. within the community by means of www-based databases. It came out that it is not appropriate to establish a new database. Instead, TFD could make a great contribution by dissemination of information on already existing databases and promotion of their use. Therefore, as a first step, all national TFD representatives are asked to deliver information on existing databases which are relevant for the field of interest of our division. The information on each database should be compiled as kind of a data sheet and include at least (proposals for completion are welcome!):

-                     name and web address of the database

-                     institution which is maintaining it, contact address,

-                     purpose and/or field of interest of the database,

-                     kind and extent of data in each entry,

-                     number of entries compiled so far,

-                     plans for the further development of the database,

-                     conditions of use,

-                     other.

By collecting such data sheets, we would be able to establish a link list to relevant databases on our IUVSTA TFD website. This would be a very valuable thing, the more as this list would already include a lot of information about the databases, corresponding to the features listed above. However, this link list would be only the minimum we can achieve. Surely, the collection and analysis of the said data sheets will give us a unique overview of the field and, hence, produce ideas for further activities of the TFD in this area.        

As an example, I have compiled a data sheet on the "Database of Surface, Plasma and Vacuum Technology" which is currently being developed by the Association of Engineers (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure – VDI), see attachment. I ask everybody to elaborate similar data sheets about relevant databases which are known to her or him. The sheets should be sent to me by the end of June this year. After that, I would analyse and compile the data for further discussion at our September 2002 meeting.

Jan Verhoeven has suggested that a new database shall be established by the office of the IUVSTA Scientific Director which is based on the contributions of the future IVC meetings and EVC meetings. This would represent a database of the "Which-group-works-on-which-topic" type and could also be included in our compilation.

2.) ECM 90

Information about the executive council meeting will be available in the usual way.

3) ECM 91 will be held at Smolenice castle near Bratislava, Slovakia, on September 13 – 15, 2002, immediately before the ICTF-12 in Bratislava. The next TFD meeting shall be in conjunction with either ECM 91 or ICTF-12, depending on how many of us will take part in each of these meetings. Please inform me as soon as this becomes clear to each of you.

Frank Richter