microscopy techniques II".

License and terms: see end of document. Surface science and nanotechnology are inherently coupled because of the increased surface-to-volume ratio at the nanometer scale. Most of the exciting and astonishing prop-erties of nanoscale materials are related to certain surface recon-structions and nanoscale geometries. New functionality is achieved by combinations of nanoscale materials or by struc-turing their surfaces. The unrivaled tools for measurements of all kind of nanoscale properties are scanning probe microscopy (SPM) techniques, which were triggered by the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in 1982 [1-3] and of the atomic force microscope (AFM) in 1986 [4]. These tools opened a huge field of nanoscale studies, from metal surfaces and clusters, molecular structures, insulators to liquid and elec-trochemical environments and even allowed the integration o