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Two-dimensional structures with tunable moiré patterns, which display tunable interlayer excitons and moiré intralayer excitons, are achieved by epitaxial bottom-up growth.
Misalignment-induced moiré patterns and chirality in two-dimensional materials offer vast opportunities for manipulating their properties, but they face challenges in synthesis and structural control.
The atomic reconstruction and stacking arrangement in twisted trilayer graphene with a range of varying twist angles are elucidated by four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy, revealing the hierarchical moiré of moiré superstructures that govern the structural symmetry at different length scales.
By means of a precise folding–tearing process, screw dislocations with helical cores — appearing in pairs and taking on a DNA-like double-helix structure — are engineered to control the growth of twisted bilayer graphene.
Multiwalled WS2 and WSe2 nanotubes with predominantly a single chiral angle are produced in a chemical vapour deposition reactor using gold nanoparticles as a catalyst. This strategy paves the way for the growth of transition metal dichalcogenide nanotubes with controllable structures for further exploring their physical properties and potential applications.
Cancer cells adjust the composition of their glycocalyx to increase its thickness and create a physical barrier that shields them from immune recognition and engagement.
Inspired by the observed coherent interface between hexagonal α-Fe2O3 and tetragonal fluorine-doped SnO2, an oxygen sublattice-matching paradigm is proposed to grow textured films on lattice-mismatched substrates. Through assessing the similarity of Voronoi cells for sublattices, this approach offers opportunities to synthesize (semi)coherent heterostructures and textured films.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials, despite their small thickness, can display chirality that enables prominent asymmetric optical, electrical transport, and magnetic properties. This Perspective discusses the intriguing physics enabled by the structural chirality and the possible ways to create and control chirality in 2D materials.
The local layer alignment in a wide range of trilayer graphene structures has been extracted by interferometric four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy, uncovering the complex picture of lattice reconstruction in twisted trilayers.
A graphene origami–kirigami technique offers an approach for growing intertwined graphene spirals with fixed twist angles, enabling the chirality of one-dimensional wrinkles to be converted into the twist angle of vertically stacked two-dimensional layers.
Controlling the periodicity of synthesized moiré materials is vital to harness their unique physics. Here the authors realize the van der Waals epitaxy of tunable moiré heterostructures and reveal the epitaxial science governing their formation.
The direct and facile growth of WS2 and WSe2 nanotubes with controllable chirality is realized using catalytic chemical vapour deposition with Au nanoparticles.
Angle-resolved transport measurements on twisted trilayer graphene reveal evidence for a variety of correlated states with spontaneous symmetry breaking, and offer evidence of momentum polarization.
Intense light pulses can induce symmetry breaking, as for the generation of ferroelectricity in SrTiO3. Using ultrafast X-ray diffuse scattering at a free-electron laser, nonlinear phonon interactions that occur on such mid-IR excitation are observed, with a theory for the dynamics presented.
Employing light-transformable polymers, multiple physical unclonable functions are demonstrated within a single device with all-optical reversible reconfigurability. Such devices may enable quantum secure authentication and nonlinear cryptographic key generation applications.
The authors propose a non-Hermitian topological insulator with a real-valued energy spectrum based on a periodically driven Floquet model implemented in a photonic platform where generalized parity–time symmetry is protected against spontaneous symmetry breaking under a spatiotemporal gain and loss distribution.
Depositing textured functional materials on transparent conducting oxides remains a challenge. We demonstrate the formation of a coherent interface between a set of functional oxides and fluorine-doped-tin-oxide-based transparent conducting oxide substrate despite the lattice mismatch, owing to dimensional and chemical matching of oxygen sublattices at the interface.
Quantifying recombination in halide perovskites is crucial, but quantitative analysis remains rare. Here the authors observe a long-lived and continuously changing photoluminescence decay time due to the high density of shallow defects and substantial rates of charge carrier trapping.
Hydrogen produced by water splitting using renewable electricity is key to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. Decoupling hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions during electrolysis is attractive but efficiency and operational challenges remain. A process producing hydrogen and oxygen in separate cells and supporting continuous operation in a membraneless system is now proposed.
The self-assembly of metallic nanoparticles on oxide supports via metal exsolution relies on dopant transport, but strong electrostatic gradients and space charges typically control the properties of surfaces. The surface–dopant interaction is shown to be the main determining factor for the exsolution kinetics of nickel in a perovskite system.
Biological tissues are extremely water rich but remain mechanically stiff, behaviour that is difficult to recapitulate in synthetic materials. Here the authors design a hydrogel/sponge hybrid material driven by a self-organized network of cyano-p-aramid nanofibres that combines these properties for biofunctional materials.
The rational design and assembly of colloidal quasicrystals is achieved by exploring the hybridization of nanoscale decahedra nanoparticles functionalized with DNA linkers.
A nanoscale polymer layer formed by mucins at the surface of tumour cells protects them against immune cell attack. This shield can be circumvented through immune cell engineering, using chimeric antigen receptors to stimulate natural killer and T cells or by tethering glycocalyx-editing enzymes to immune cells.