Nanoscience on Surfaces

In nanotechnology, various scientific and technological fields meet: physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, medicine and tribology. This habilitation thesis comprises the author’s work in the area of scanning probe microscopy and diatom nanotechnology. The largest samples (some micrometers) investigated in this thesis comprise the first atomic force microscopy investigations of living diatoms in ambient conditions. Based on these investigations, the author introduces the new field of diatom tribology. Subsequently, the first atomic force microscopy investigations of protein-protein interactions on the single molecule level (some tens of nanometers) are presented. Finally, scanning probe microscopy is used to visualize the interaction of single slow ions with atomically flat surfaces. Nanodefects with a height of just some nanometers are reported.