The development of advanced, human like tactile sensing capabilities is one of the key challenges for next generation robots or prosthetics. Tactile sensors arrays will need to exhibit the desired sensing capabilities, show robustness to external influences as well as good approaches for the integration of large amounts of sensors. We present a tactile sensor array technology, based on the fabrication of a flexible interconnection substrate containing directly integrated tactile sensors. This approach has several advantages: interconnection substrate technology is widely available making upscaling of sensor arrays easy to a large amount of sensors and/or large sensing areas, the direct integration of sensors allows for a simple and very compact approach to densely packed sensor arrays and the structured flexible substrate enables integration into complex, three-dimensional bodies. We present sensors with a size of $600~\mu \text{m}$ and arrays of up to $12\times12$ individually addressable sensors. The sensors have a wide measurement range; free membrane deformation results in a high sensitivity of 2.6 kPa ⁻¹ respectively 2600 N ⁻¹ for small applied pressures (0–0.6 kPa) whereas deforming polymer studs extend the measurement range for larger applied pressures (5–25 kPa) with a sensitivity of 0.022 kPa ⁻¹ respectively 22 N ⁻¹ . A statistical study of six sensor arrays from three wafers showed repeatable performance of the fabricated structures and robustness tests proved the stable sensing conditions over 10’000 cycles. [2021-0072]

We report on the measurement of the Raman intensity of radial breathing modes of a relatively large diameter range of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) by confocal Raman scattering. Statistical data analysis yielded an intensity distribution within the excitation width of the single laser line at $2.33\mathrm{eV}$. These measurements were compared to recent nonorthogonal tight-binding calculations on the Raman intensity where a match could be found. The mapping allowed for accurate determination of optical transition energies of the nanotubes and their chirality. Higher $E_{33}^{\mathrm{M}}$ and $E_{55}^{\mathrm{S}}$ optical transitions of both metallic and semiconducting SWNTs could be recorded for which intensity calculations were extended to tube diameters up to $2.6\mathrm{nm}$.