EMRP RESEARCH PROJECT: NEW TRACEABILITY ROUTES FOR NANOMETROLOGY

Through the iMERA European project the metrology community and its stakeholders identified the major challenges for European metrology for the coming years, focusing particularly on those challenges best addressed collaboratively. Following a road-mapping exercise these challenges were captured in the European Metrology Research Programme (EMRP) (www.emrp.eu). The aim of the Joint Research Project (JRP) “Nanotrace ” here presented is National Metrology Institutes to collaborate in finding and testing new interferometric techniques to allow traceability of sensors and actuators at the nanoscale with a target accuracy better than 10 pm on a 10 to 100 um scale. In the last two decades the invention and the development of scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has revolutionized the microscopic world science: scanning tunnel microscopy, atomic force microscopy and optical probe microscopy made possible observations and measurements with a resolution unthinkable before. The sub atomic resolution has made possible to observe the shape of molecules, the arrangement of atoms on a crystal, to study chemical reactions to the atomic level. The common principle of the SPMs, a probe ti