The ENSIGN project emphasises international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration between participating organisations through staff exchange, sharing of knowledge and ideas, and further developing the leading-edge technologies for the simultaneous correlative nanoscopy aimed at single entity characterisation, and thus boosting sustainable energy storage production, cell biology and mechanobiology for early diagnosis and precise treatment. The ultimate goal is to establish long-term research collaboration between participating organisations in the challenging field of correlative nanoscopy. The established synergistic approach will keep the leading position of the consortium in the world for potential major scientific and technological breakthroughs for energy and healthcare applications. 

The main objective of the ENSIGN on research and innovation is to explore the cutting-edge technologies for high speed quantitative correlative nanoscopy for simultaneous multimodal single entity characterisation. The technology oriented objectives are given as below:

• Establishment of a knowledge base and roadmap containing the relevant existing technologies and elaboration of user requirements and applications for the emerging nanoscopy development.
• Exploration of the fundamentals of the advanced nanoscopy including multifrequency force nanoscopy, scanning microwave nanoscopy, electrostatic force nanoscopy, scanning electrochemical nanoscopy for the measurement of mechanical and physical and chemical properties of single entities. This will involve the development of nonlinear model of the tip-sample interaction, novel signal modulation and sensing, multiphysics modelling and optimisation, rapid parameter extraction from observables, and system calibration, integration and control techniques.
• Development of high speed and quantitative correlative nanoscopy combining advanced mechanical and electrical force nanoscopy and photo/electron nanoscopy. This will include the development of simultaneous scanning modality, data sampling and storage, image registration, segmentation, and reconstruction for 3D representation, software and hardware integrated implementation.
• Evaluation of the imaging and measurement methodologies for single entity characterisation. This will involve cell and protein characterisation, cell virus/bacteria interaction mechanism, and battery electrode surface measurement. The feature of single cells/proteins with external stimulations will be analysed for characterisation, diagnosis, and therapy, the interaction between virus and cell will be investigated to decipher the infection mechanism, the capacitance and resistance of nanoelectronic devices.
• Standardisation of the developed nanoscopy for traceable and reproducible metrology and characterisation. The procedures for the instrument calibration, sample preparation, experimental testing will be optimised and standardised under the framework of ISO/TC201 SC9. The technical reports and pre-standards will be prepared for the contribution to the advanced nanoscopy standardisation.