Industry needs fall into two main categories:

• metrology suites for rapid non-destructive characterization of photonic materials in terms of optical, electronic, and structural characteristics for bulk crystals and thin films
  
  
• semiconductor nanowire technology and metrology for sensing, biomedical, materials science and electronics applications

Gallium nitride and related materials have made enormous recent economic impact with the realization of semiconductor lasers and LEDs emitting in the blue and UV for display, optical data storage, water purification, and biological agent detection. Other important applications of this material system include high-power, high-temperature transistors and solar-blind UV detectors. Problems with bulk and thin-film growth of these materials remain, however, hindering the ability to meet the application demands. There persists a fundamental lack of understanding of the role of defects on the electrical, optical, and structural properties of these materials. These issues compel the development of new correlated metrology methods, with resolution on the scale of 20 to 100 nm. Furthermore, the lack of a database for the linear optical properties of the III nitrides is hampering development of engineering design tools for blue-emitting GaN-based laser diodes.

Semiconductor quantum nanowires (SQNWs) offer new revolutionary applications in biological/chemical sensors, in-vivo biomedical diagnostics and therapies, nanoscale electronics, optoelectronics, and nanoscale thermal management. For example, SQNW lasers with emission apertures roughly 20–100 nm in diameter (about the size of a virus) would permit development of a new class of tools for ultra-high-resolution microscopy and cellular-level imaging. In pursuing such new capabilities, researchers and technologists must confront the facts that fundamental physical properties do not often scale from macro to nano regimes, and that many relevant nanoscale metrology practices are immature or nonexistent. For SQNWs, these issues force an unusually strong coupling of technology development with metrology, and create new challenges and opportunities for both.