• The next NanoScale will take place October 20th to 22nd, 2026, at NPL, Teddington, London, UK, organized by the team around Andrew Yacoot, supported by the PTB team around Gaoliang Dai and Thorsten Dziomba. Some working groups of the Consultative Committee Length (CCL) are likely to meet in conjunction with NanoScale. While Tuesday to Thursday are reserved for NanoScale, those CCL-WG meetings will preferrably take place on Monday, October 19th, and Friday, October 23rd (delegates only; further information will be given by the chairpersons in due time) 
   
• It is recommended to check the conditions for entry to the UK. An ID-card is no longer accepted for entry to the UK! Citizens of EU countries need a passport - please consult with your institute's mobility management whether a private passport or an official passport is required.  For German citizens at PTB, a private passport is currently considered sufficient by the PTB mobility management, but this may need to be checked again in early 2026 in light of the tightening of British entry rules. You may already apply for a new passport now, bearing in mind that waiting times may be very long in some countries. In addition to the passport, an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) is needed. It can be obtained a few weeks before the business trip.
   
• Attendees from non-EU countries usually need a visa for the UK. As the UK is neither part of the EU nor a Schengen country, Schengen visa do not help for Britain. Guests from overseas may need two different visas if they wish to attend NanoScale in England and visit institutes in the EU. Please consult with the organizers as early as possible. Due to the increased international tensions since 2022-02-24, both UK and EU countries persue a rather tight visa policy.

• Proceedings: As of March 13th, 2025, the virtual Special Issue of MST is complete and ready for download! All manuscripts that have successfully completed the review are listed and linked on the landing page of the NanoScale MST special section 

• Most papers of our MST Special Issue are anyway open access. Please feel free to download and read them! Those articles that are not open access were made available for free download to all NanoScale 2023 attendees for a limited time.

Do you measure topographies with optical microscopes (such as confocal, interference or focus variation microscopes)? We invite you to contribute your expertise to jointly develop a new guideline for areal optical roughness measurement! Under the leadership of the VDI/VDE GMA technical committee 4.22 "Surface measurement technology in the micro- and nanometer range", the kick-off meeting for the new guideline VDI/VDE 2655-2.1 took place on January 24, 2025 - further supporters from the areas of instrument manufacturing, application and measurement service are warmly welcome! Participation is free of charge. The project group uses to meet regularly (typically once per month), mainly virtually, under the lead of Sebastian Boedecker (Polytec). Once finished, the guideline will be published in a bilingual version German/English.

The work on the guideline will be based on Good Practice Guide (GPG) No. 1 "Selection of instrumentation for optical roughness measurements with CM, CSI and FV" that was developed in the TracOptic project (see Special Session at NanoScale 2023). 

The guideline series 2655 provides practical guidance on characterization, calibration and application of optical surface measurement instruments and thereby complements the more general standards of the ISO 25178 series developed in ISO/TC 213/WG 16. Several parts of the ISO 25178 series refer to the guideline series VDI 2655, as these guidelines are considered to help the readers with detailed practical instructions to implement ISO 25178 procedures. 

If you know experts in the field, please feel free to forward this call of participation - more info and a flyer are available on the PTB webside, and Sebastian Boedecker (Polytec) and Thorsten Dziomba (PTB) will be happy to answer your questions.

NanoScale 2023 took place in the conference centre Technopolis Ruoholahti (location map) in the West of the centre of Helsinki, just 2 km from the heart of the town (i. e. from Market Square, Cathedral, Esplanades...) from October 10th to 12th, 2023. After a break of 4 years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it was generally appreciated that the conference was fully in person (with one hybrid session as open stakeholder meeting).

• Proceedings: All manuscripts that have successfully completed the review are listed and linked on the landing page of the NanoScale MST special section 

• 106 participants from 24 countries on all continents took part at NanoScale in Helsinki.
  This is about as many as in the record-year 2019!
  Warm thanks to all participants for their inspiring scientific exchange and so many good conversations!

• A total of 83 presentations were given - Many thanks to all authors!
  31 oral presentations, 52 posters (see program at a glance - pdf)

• As by far more abstracts for oral presentation had been submitted, the Scientific Committee reviewed all abstracts for talks based on a scoring system to decide whether these papers are accepted as a talk or as a poster.

• NanoScale 2023 included Special Sessions on "High-speed SPM measurements of functional properties of nanostructures" and "3D roughness & dimensional measurements using optical 3D microsopy and optical distance sensors" (EMPIR projects 20IND08 MetExSPM and 20IND07 TracOptic).

• The Book ob Abstracts - All submissions are included in the Book of Abstracts that was handed out to the participants upon check-in and made available to them for download as pdf-file.

• In addition to the scientific talks and posters, an excursion to the VTT MIKES labs on the Otaniemi campus in Espoo was organized for the NanoScale attendees on Thursday afternoon. Please see Program for details. Further lab tours were offered in conjunction with the other meetings of the Length Metrology Week on other days. We thank our colleagues at VTT MIKES for hosting so many groups of guests in their labs.