Scanning Probe Microscopies. An introduction to Nano-scale Engineering

In the 1990s, there was a considerable development in molecular chemistry through super- and supra-supermolecular stages. These featured large molecular arrays, from interlocked organic macromolecules, nanotubes, dendrimers, polyphenylenes, and many others - especially self-assembling molecules (SAM) - in repeating units in the 5 - 100 nm range. Simultaneously, materials science, and especially electronics, is still going down from microns to nanometers through utilisation of ever-shorter wavelengths in beam lithographies on substrates, especially silicon ones. In addition, unconventional fabrication methods for patterning nanostructures (again for electronics and optoelectronics) are also emerging, at the same time overlapping with other fields where mesoscopic order is responsible for function, such as bio-ordering (shells, plate ordering in animal shells and wings, DNA-derived assemblies, and so on). These strands of research, which together with the basic physics underlying them, constituted the nano-nineties in materials are merging into a nanoscience whose borders are still expanding. At the end of the eighties, it met a long-established, but still rapidly developing, group of techniques based on scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) which were (and still are) capable of monitoring surfaces at the nanoscale. As the field advances, these techniques are increasingly able to answer the question : what has actually been produced...?, which given the dimensional complexity of the systems involved, is not always a trivial one in these fields. More importantly, scanning probe microscopies have helped to integrate measurement and fabrication in a single step, which is essential for 'designing-in' the performance required (of a device, for example).It is the aim of this small book to both introduce the reader to the basic methods, outline some major fields of application and provide at least a flavour of the excitement at the interface of the growth/fabrication of large ensembles which by general consent will have a huge impact on next-generation electronics.