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An electromechanical response to an out-of-plane electric field in van der Waals heterostructures enables direct visualization of moiré superlattices using piezoresponse force microscopy.
The accumulation of nanoplastics in terrestrial plants is directly linked to the nanoparticles’ charge and can have ecological effects and implications for agricultural sustainability and food safety.
A phase battery is a quantum device that provides a persistent phase bias to the wave function of a quantum circuit. A hybrid superconducting and magnetic circuit containing two anomalous Josephson junctions can provide a tunable Josephson phase that persists in the absence of external stimuli.
In a radiative Auger process, an excited electron relaxes by concomitant emission of a redshifted photon and energy transfer to another electron. Measuring radiative Auger processes in a quantum dot with single-photon resolution enables determination of the energy of single-electron levels as well as their lifetimes.
Easy-plane antiferromagnet materials promise low-energy control of ultrafast magnetic dynamics in future spintronics applications, but host magnons with vanishing angular momentum, which makes spin transport via magnons unlikely. Through interference of two linearly polarized propagating magnons, spin transport over micrometre distances is yet possible.
The controlled creation of magnetic skyrmions is a prerequisite for their application in future spintronic devices. While charge currents can induce skyrmions via spin torque, surface acoustic waves can do the same through magnetoelastic coupling of inhomogeneous strain paired with thermal fluctuations.
Phage capsids modified with spatially defined patterns of host cell ligands can act as multivalent binders for the influenza A virus to prevent viral infection.
Topological insulators have been studied primarily with regard to the behaviour of electrons. A theoretical study now shows that a single layer of a metal dichalcogenide can become a topological insulator for excitons.
Knowledge and control of the dynamic response in micromagnetic configurations is important both for understanding their fundamental properties and for their use in technological applications. Pump–probe magnetic laminography now unveils the evolution of the magnetization in a three-dimensional system with nanoscale resolution.
Stress relaxation properties of the matrix as well as water transport through aquaporin-1 enable extracellular vesicles to deform and travel through the dense mesh of the extracellular matrix between cells.
The spontaneous relaxation of misfit strain achieved on graphene-coated substrates enables the growth of heteroepitaxial single-crystalline films with reduced dislocation density.
Gauge fields in condensed matter give rise to nonreciprocal transport and topological non-trivial states. In an on-chip experiment, multi-mode optomechanical interactions generate a magnetic gauge field for nanomechanical motion and yield phonon transport with a nonreciprocal phase.
Tunnel field-effect transistors with spatially varying layer thickness in black phosphorus enable high performance with a record-low subthreshold swing.
Controlling the individual layer magnetization in CrI3 enables the observation of a layer-resolved magnetic proximity effect in WSe2/CrI3 heterostructures.
A double-buffer-layer engineering strategy enables the selective growth of magnetic materials at specific locations on a wide variety of semiconducting nanorods.
Skyrmions and antiskyrmions are nanometric spin whirls with opposite topological charges. In the Heusler magnet Mn1.4Pt0.9Pd0.1Sn, modulations of the orientation and strength of an in-plane magnetic field induces the transformation from antiskyrmions to non-topological bubbles and skyrmions.
Tautomerization, the interconversion between two constitutional isomers of a molecule, plays a major role in chemistry. The combination of hyper-resolved fluorescence microscopy with time-correlated measurements and spectral selection enables the identification and in-depth characterization of a tautomerization reaction within a single molecular switch.
