Recently, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tsinghua University has made a significant progress in the field of nanoscale characterization. Prof. Zhen Zhang and his collaborative team developed a novel method and system for large-scale, stitchless scanning probe characterization. This innovation, by means of the synchronized motion of a compliant nano-manipulator and a piezoelectric scanner, effectively eliminates the stitching errors and bow-shaped distortions inherent in the existing large-scale "step-scan" characterization methods. It enables macroscale (millimeter), high-throughput, stitchless nanoscale characterization, expanding the continuous characterization scope by two orders of magnitude compared to the existing systems. Moreover, the proposed system lays the groundwork for large-scale, stitchless, and high-throughput nanofabrication. This technology holds promising applications in material science, biology, physics, nanoelectronics, etc.

The aforementioned work was recently published in the journal Small entitled "Ultra-large scale stitchless AFM: Advancing nanoscale characterization and manipulation with zero stitching error and high throughput". This article was featured as the Back Cover of the journal.

The corresponding authors are Prof. Zhen Zhang (Tsinghua University) and Prof. Yingchun Guan (Beihang University). The first author is Yijie Liu, a Ph.D. candidate at Tsinghua University. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 52275564.

Link to the article:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smll.202303838