Book excerpt: This volume documents the proceedings of the Second Symposium on Particles on Surfaces: Detection, Adhesion and Removal held as part of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Fine Particle Society in Santa Clara, California, July 20-25, 1988. The premier symposium on this topic was l organized in 1986 and has been properly chronicled . Based on the success of these two events and the high interest evinced by the technical community, we plan to regularly hold symposia on this topic on a biennial basis and the next one is slated for August 20-24, 1990 in San Diego, California. l As pointed out in the Preface to the first volume , the topic of particles on surfaces is of paramount importance in legion of technological areas. Particularly in the semiconductor device fabrication area, all signals indicate that the understanding of the behavior of particles on surfaces and their removal will attain heightened importance in the times to come. As the device dimensions are shrinking at an accelerated pace, so the benign particles of today will become the killer defects in the not too distant future. The tempo of research and development activity in the field of particles on surfaces is very high, and better and novel ways are continuously being devised to remove smaller and smaller particles.