Vocabulary of Definitions for more than 1000 Terms for Surface Chemical Analysis – ISO18115
The surface chemical analysis vocabulary provides the definitions for more than 1000 surface chemical analysis terms in the three ISO International Standards:
- 1) ISO 18115-1:2023(en), Surface chemical analysis — Vocabulary — Part 1: General terms and terms used in spectroscopy
- 2) ISO 18115-2:2021(en), Surface chemical analysis — Vocabulary — Part 2: Terms used in scanning-probe microscopy
- 3) ISO 18115-3:2022(en), Surface chemical analysis — Vocabulary — Part 3: Terms used in optical interface analysis
These documents, available from ISO (International Standards Organization in Geneva) or your National Standards Body, cover the terms used in surface analysis spectroscopies such as Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and many similar methods as well as in the scanned probe microscopies (SPM) such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM), scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and many similar methods. New to the 2023 version are terms related to atom probe tomography (APT).
Because it is important for analysts, researchers and students to communicate clearly and unambiguously, these definitions are now freely available from the ISO using the above links to the documents or
The general ISO Online Browsing Platform is also useful for searching for terms not included in the above standards but that may have been defined in other relevant standards covering the wider spheres of chemistry, optics, etc. It provides all definitions for any given term in ISO standards (click "Terms & Definitions" button) from the different fields so that they may be compared.