Nanometrology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Substrate patterning offers additional degrees of freedom to engineer the structure and function of a semiconductor device. Here, fully-enclosed germanium cavities, with size and position tunable through the initial mask pattern, can be created through an unexpected self-assembly process.

Optics used for X-ray focusing suffer from wavelength dependent effects like chromatic aberration. Here the authors demonstrate fabrication of a ultracompact Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror and use it for achromatic focusing to 20 nm spot for the soft X-ray at 2-keV photon energy.

Rachith Kumar and coworkers report a bio-inspired coating technique able to deposit uniform films with thicknesses below 15 nm on various substrates. This method will not require the use of extended ink formulation or high substrate temperature as existing techniques do, potentially reducing the fabrication cost of future electronic devices and batteries.

The authors report subatomic precision in measuring the displacement of a nanowire. Such precision is achieved by employing deep-learning enabled analysis of single-shot scattering of topologically structured superoscillatory illumination.

Light–matter interactions are already used to induce new states in condensed-matter systems — such as in Floquet engineering. Combining these ideas with the vectorial properties of structured light promises to further expand the toolbox for optical control of quantum properties of matter.

Tiny quantities of heat delivered on demand by discrete quantum excitations expand the horizon of quantum electrical metrology.

Aberration-corrected electron microscopes are now being exploited to achieve quantitative atomic-resolution information about surface morphology from a single image.