The combination of atomic force microscopy and Kelvin probe technology is a powerful tool to obtain high-resolution maps of the surface potential distribution on conducting and nonconducting samples. However, resolution and contrast transfer of this method have not been fully understood, so far. To obtain a better quantitative understanding, we introduce a model which correlates the measured potential with the actual surface potential distribution, and we compare numerical simulations of the three-dimensional tip-specimen model with experimental data from test structures. The observed potential is a locally weighted average over all potentials present on the sample surface. The model allows us to calculate these weighting factors and, furthermore, leads to the conclusion that good resolution in potential maps is obtained by long and slender but slightly blunt tips on cantilevers of minimal width and surface area.

The paper presents a new generation of torque-controlled lightweight robots (LWR) developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center. In order to act in unstructured environments and interact with humans, the robots have design features and control/software functionalities which distinguish them from classical robots, such as: load-to-weight ratio of 1:1, torque sensing in the joints, active vibration damping, sensitive collision detection, as well as compliant control on joint and Cartesian level. Due to the partially unknown properties of the environment, robustness of planning and control with respect to environmental variations is crucial. After briefly describing the main hardware features, the paper focuses on showing how joint torque sensing (as a main feature of the robot) is consequently used for achieving the above mentioned performance, safety, and robustness properties.

Sheets and rational synthesis are not like fire and water! Hexafunctional terpyridine monomers can be laterally connected by metal salts to result in a mechanically stable, sheetlike entity that can be transferred from the air/water interface to a solid substrate (see the folded, ca. 1.4 nm thin film) and spanned over micrometer‐sized holes. This result is considered an important step on the way to 2D polymers.

Imaging temperature fields at the nanoscale is a central challenge in various areas of science and technology. Nanoscopic hotspots, such as those observed in integrated circuits or plasmonic nanostructures, can be used to modify the local properties of matter, govern physical processes, activate chemical reactions and trigger biological mechanisms in living organisms. The development of high-resolution thermometry techniques is essential for understanding local thermal non-equilibrium processes during the operation of numerous nanoscale devices. Here we present a technique to map temperature fields using a scanning thermal microscope. Our method permits the elimination of tip-sample contact-related artefacts, a major hurdle that so far has limited the use of scanning probe microscopy for nanoscale thermometry. We map local Peltier effects at the metal-semiconductor contacts to an indium arsenide nanowire and self-heating of a metal interconnect with 7 mK and sub-10 nm spatial temperature resolution.

During the last decade, various efforts have been undertaken to enhance the resolution of optical microscopes, mostly because of their importance in biological sciences. Herein, we describe a method to increase the resolution of fluorescence microscopy by illuminating the specimen with a mesh-like interference pattern of a laser source and electronic postprocessing of the images. We achieve 100-nm optical resolution, an improvement by a factor of more than 2 compared with standard fluorescence microscopy and of 1.5 compared with confocal scanning.