Nanophysics and Nanotechnology: From Quanta to Weak Forces Metrology

At the heart of nanoscience lies mesoscopic physics, focused on systems at atomic and sub-microscopic scales. Several nanoscale properties and physical phenomena explained under the umbrella of quantum physics occupy a special place. Advances made in the physical knowledge of nanoworld and its metrology are addressed, but not focusing in detail on the diversity of applications in nanotechnology and instrumentation. A special attention is devoted to the countless potentialities of the modern local scanning probes, enabling the reader to travel across several domains of experimental physics, just by making use of different tips and modes of operation. Detailed technological aspects have been the subject of many publications, and so it is assumed that the reader has acquired a basic prior knowledge of most of those aspects. Modern scanning probes can sense a local microscopic property of a specimen and even modify it, while measuring the physical quantity, then process and convert its local variations to a 3D real-space representation of the surface at the nanoscale. These experimental achievements opened the door to further deep studies of extreme weak forces present at nano- or sub-micron scales, which play a non-negligible role in nanotribology and micro- or nano-machines.