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β-sheet stack structures in protein crystals are held together with some of nature's weakest links: hydrogen bonds. It turns out that the size of the crystal stack makes a difference to its strength — and smaller is better.
A solar-cell design based on silicon microwires achieves efficient absorption of sunlight while using only 1% of the active material used in conventional designs.
The observation of Aharonov–Bohm oscillations in nanoribbons of Bi2Se3 opens the way for electronic transport experiments in nanoscale three-dimensional topological insulators.
Conflicting observations of the speed at which various ferromagnetic materials respond to an external femtosecond laser excitation have generated considerable controversy. It is now shown that ferromagnets can be divided in two categories, according to the values of specific magnetic parameters.
The formation of vortices in multiferroic hexagonal manganites, where the sign of electric polarization changes six times around the vortex core, points towards the origin of composite multiferroic domain walls.
Spin relaxation in organic materials is expected to be slow because of weak spin–orbit coupling. The effects of deuteration and coherent spin excitation show that the spin-relaxation time is actually limited by hyperfine fields.
Stable particle-like molecular architectures are written in a frustrated chiral-nematic liquid crystal using a vortex laser beam. This fundamentally new mechanism to form toroidal features with anisotropic optical properties has great potential to create new applications in liquid-crystal photonics.
By using an ionic liquid as a gate dielectric, superconductivity can be induced in an inorganic band insulator up to a temperature of 15 K by an electric field, opening new directions in superconductivity research.
The realization of electrical sources of surface plasmon polaritons using complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology is a significant step towards silicon-compatible nanoscale photonic devices.
Experiments have shown that the physical characteristics of the matrix surrounding a stem cell can affect its behaviour. This picture gets further complicated by studies of stem cells and their differentiated counterparts that show that the cells' own softness also has a clear role in how they respond to stress.
Most crystalline materials expand when heated. Now, the packing arrangement of an organic dumbbell-shaped molecule is seen to bring about a large thermal contraction of its crystal lattice.
500 years after the first studies on friction, the concepts of superlubricity, wearless sliding and friction control are being realized in laboratories and have become predictable by adequate modelling. The challenge now is to bridge the gap between what is known about these processes on the microscopic and macroscopic scales.
