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Any experiment designed to study the physical or chemical properties of a surface whose composition is representative of the bulk material requires the preparation of a surface free of contamination and the maintenance of cleanliness for a sufficient amount of time to perform the experiment. If the time required is of the order of several minutes or hours, then the surfaces must be prepared and maintained in vacuum of the order of 1 ntorr or less.
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Richard W. Roberts (1963) studied this question.
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