Advanced Design and Control for Nanopositioning

What is Nanopositioning?
Nanopositioning is the science and engineering of moving  and sensing the position of tools, objects, and matter at the nanometer scale.  The ultimate goal is to do so with the highest precision, accuracy, and speed as possible.

One nanometer is one billionth of a meter, which is a small unit of length.  How small is this?  Consider the marble and Earth example.  If the Earth (with a diameter of approximately 12,756 km) was scaled to 1 meter, then a normal-sized object on Earth such as a marble would be representative of 1 nanometer.  Experts often argue over what constitutes as ‘nanotechnology’, but in general most would agree that it’s dealing with anything measuring between 1 and 100 nanometers (nm). Larger than that is the microscale, and smaller than that is the atomic scale.

Nanopositioning Research
Our research on nanopositioning focuses on three key areas:

  1. Mechanical design of high-performance nanopositioning stages (click here to see our nanopositioners),
  2. Control theory for enhancing the performance of nanopositioning stages, and
  3. Sensing technologies for measuring the motion of nanopositioning stages.

Much of our work relates to creating high-speed high-precision nanopositioning platforms for scanning probe microscopes (SPMs) and related technologies.

Publications related to nanopositioning:

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