Share Apply now Materials science and technology are our passion. With our cutting-edge research, Empa's around 1,100 employees make essential contributions to the well-being of society for a future worth living. Empa is a research institution of the ETH Domain. Our Magnetic & Functional Thin Films Group designs and fabricates magnetic and functional thin films with tailored properties arising from nanoscale effects. These materials are explored for applications ranging from magnetoelectronic devices to advanced biomedical systems. A central strength of our group is the development and operation of unique, home-built scanning probe microscopy platforms that enable quantitative magnetic field measurements with nanometer-scale spatial resolution and ultra-high sensitivity. These systems allow, for example, the detection of extremely weak stray fields, including those emerging from antiferromagnetic thin films. Our instrumentation integrates magnetic force microscopy (MFM) with complementary techniques such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM), and piezo-response force microscopy (PFM). This multimodal approach enables the correlation of magnetic signals with structural, electrical, and functional properties at the nanoscale. We apply thes