Launched in December 2017, the European project NMPB (Nanotechnologies, Advanced Materials, Biotechnology and Production) entitled MMAMA carried by IEMN and built with Keysight Technologies® (leader in microwave test and measurement equipment – Austria), METAS (Institute of Metrology – Switzerland), Materia Nova® ASBL (Materials Research and Engineering Center – Belgium), ETHZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich – Switzerland), QWED® (SME – microwave software and hardware solutions), Dracula Technologies® (SME – photovoltaic solutions), Adamant Composites® LTD (SME – nano-composite materials and structures), Ayming (monitoring and communication) aims to develop a unique microwave characterization and modeling platform for advanced materials analysis for a large community. This platform aims at optimizing the quality and the manufacturing of these materials/structures in an industrial context.

MMAMA is interested in the chemical industry which offers a wide range of organic and non-organic nanoparticles addressing different sectors and applications. The quality and performance of the final product depends mainly on the chemical, electrical, optical and/or mechanical properties of these nanoparticles as well as on their arrangement at the macroscopic scale (amorphous, partially amorphous, hybrid/composite, multilayer). The same observation can be made for thin film materials. The chemical constituents of a layered material are usually known but the morphology, the thickness of the layers and the properties of the interfaces are crucial to determine the performance of the final product. Macroscopic characterizations are commonly used to verify properties on material surfaces. In this field of materials properties testing and characterization, there is a ‘gap’ between the nano- and macro-worlds regarding the types of instruments and testing methodologies and incidentally to the types of data measured. On the one hand, in a laboratory context, local probe microscopy or scanning electron microscopy techniques allow to reach resolutions of a few tens of nanometers but are destructive due to the preparation of the sample to be characterized. On the other hand, the resolution of the measuring equipment for the on-line test is low but the methods are fast and do not require particular expertise.