The Four Pillars of Nanopositioning for Scanning Probe Microscopy: The Position Sensor, the Scanning Device, the Feedback Controller, and the Reference Trajectory

Since its birth in the 1980s, nanotechnology has significantly advanced our understanding and control of physical processes on the nanometer and subnanometer scale. Manipulation and interrogation of matter on these length scales have become indispensable in various fields of engineering and science and have been instrumental in some of the most exciting scientific and engineering breakthroughs of the past decades. Application areas include scanning probe microscopy (SPM) [1], data storage [2], and semiconductor device fabrication [3]. In all these applications, control of motion and position at length scales down to the size of a single atom, often referred to as nanopositioning, is a key enabling tool.