Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and various modes of AFM such as magnetic force microscopy (MFM), electrostatic and Kelvin probe force microscopies (EFM & KPFM), current-sensing atomic force microscopy (CS-AFM) and piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) were and are used to characterise the physical properties of surfaces and nanomaterials. The topics of these research deal with applications such as organic thin film transistors, charge dissipation in antistatic felts, magnetic structures in high performance steels, magnetic reversal process in arrays of magnetic nanowires, development of plastic ferroelectrics and of magneto-electric hybrid nanostructured layers, ...