Introduction: the interdisciplinary nature of nanotechnology and its need to exploit frontier characterization techniques

High-performance electronic and optoelectronic devices based on semiconductor heterostructures are required to obtain increasingly strict and well-defined performances, needing a detailed control, at the atomic level, of the structural composition of the buried interfaces. This goal has been achieved by an improvement in the epitaxial growth techniques and by the parallel use of increasingly sophisticated characterization techniques and of increasingly accurate ab initio calculations. This chapter, introducing the book Characterization of Semi-conductor Heterostructures and Nanostructures, is divided into five sections. In Section 1, the impact of nanoscience and nanotechnology in our society is described, using the point of view of the articles, the citations and the journals devoted to the field. The multidisciplinary nature of nanotechnology is reported in Section 2, while the dynamic interplay among growth/synthesis techniques, theoretical modeling, and characterization techniques in the design and improvement of semiconductor heterostructure-based devices is discussed in Section 3. Section 4 reports the purposes of the book and the layout of the chapters. Finally, in Section 5, the strength of combined experimental and theoretical investigation of a selected nanomaterial is underlined by an example