usual approach to characterization of the thin fi lms dielectric properties assumes fabrication of sandwich (parallel-plate) or planar (interdigitated) capacitors or coplanar waveguides from micrometer to tens and hundreds of micrometers in dimensions. [5][6][7] Apparently, such approach is capable of delivering information only about fi lm properties averaged over a relatively large area. While this can be appropriate for single-crystalline epitaxial thin fi lms, the information about properties of single morphological elements of polycrystalline fi lms-such as fabricated by magnetron sputtering-cannot be obtained. Additionally, only macroscopic scale devices can be characterized. Fabrication of test devices is destructive for thin fi lms with a consequence that generally, characterized fi lms cannot be further used for fabrication of desired functional structures.Furthermore, a problem for polycrystalline fi lms are always pinholes leading to shorts in capacitor structures. The density of the pinholes increases with decreasing fi lm thickness, so that sample with a thicknesses of about 50 nm and below are hardly accessible to the measurements with lithographically fabricated capacitor structures since the electrodes should be made very small. On the other side, in general, thinner fi lms show worse performance than thicker fi lms, often related to "dead layers," i.e., layers with reduced permittivity and tunability at the electrode interfaces. A possibility to measure dielectric properties without top electrodes can help to discriminate between dead layers at bottom and at top electrodes as well as fi lm defects and, therefore, guide the development of improved bottom or top electrodes in the tunable devices. Therefore, noninvasive and nondestructive characterization methods capable of a high spatial resolution are required. The scanning probe techniques offer the opportunity of accessing the dielectric properties of nanoscale thin fi lms without the extensive effort of lithographically structured electrodes.In this paper, we used two scanning probe microscopy techniques-near-fi eld scanning microwave microscopy (SMM) and piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM)-to characterize and image tunability in a thin paraelectric fi lm. Using a polycrystalline Ba 0.6 Sr 0.4 TiO 3 (BST) fi lm as a model system, we prove that near-fi eld microwave imaging and PFM provide similar information about dielectric tunability with high spatial resolution in the 10's of nm regime. This is key to understand the origin of macroscopic material properties and its correlation to the underlying microstructure and defects as pathway for material Two scanning probe microscopy techniques-near-fi eld scanning microwave microscopy (SMM) and piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM)-are used to characterize and image tunability in a thin (Ba,Sr)TiO 3 fi lm with nanometer scale spatial resolution. While sMIM allows direct probing of tunability by measurement of the change in the dielectric constant, in PFM, tunability can be extracted via electrostrict...