The 19th International Conference on Ion Beam Analysis will be held in Cambridge to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the very first backscattering experiment. This land mark experiment performed at the University of Manchester by a student (Ernest Marsden) of Ernest Rutherford under the guidance of Hans Geiger. The results of this experiment led to a complete revision of our understanding of the structure of the atom two years later and the birth of the Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy technique, the rest – as they say – is history.

The Ion Beam Analysis (IBA) conference is a biennial series and has a long tradition of being the international forum to discuss recent research and future prospects in Ion Beam Analysis. The conference brings together physicists, materials scientists, biologists and also those who are interested in the analysis of any material using ion beams.