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Lightweight, flexible and strong fibre actuators that respond to solvents and vapours are made by twisting together several well-aligned helical fibres of multiwalled carbon nanotubes.
Thin-film transistors made from solution-processed single-walled carbon nanotubes are used to fabricate large-scale integrated arrays of complementary static random access memory cells.
The sodiation–desodiation properties of few-layer phosphorene are mostly preserved by sandwiching the material between graphene layers, a behaviour that makes phosphorene–graphene hybrids a potentially suitable anode material for sodium-ion batteries.
A single iron atom adsorbed on a platinum surface can act as the basic constituent of a Hund's metal—known as a Hund's impurity—and its magnetic properties can be probed and manipulated using the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope.
Large-area graphene devices synthesized by chemical vapour deposition are used to develop electrical resistance standards, based on the quantum Hall effect, with state-of-the-art accuracy and under an extended range of experimental conditions of magnetic field, temperature and current.
The discrimination of nucleic acid sequences and the detection of sequence-specific nucleic acid binding events by protein nanopores can be parallelized by optically encoding the ionic flux through the pores.
The photocurrent in polymorphic phase areas of BiFeO3 is enhanced by a factor of 100 due to interfacial strain gradients across the different structural phases.
Silicon pillars with elliptical cross-section are used to fabricate efficient metasurfaces that allow simultaneous control of the phase and polarization of the transmitted electromagnetic radiation.
Synthetic polymer wires, which contain short oligonucleotides extending from each repeat, can assemble into predesigned routings on two- and three-dimensional DNA origami templates.
The scanning tunnelling microscope can be used to image and manipulate individual defects in bulk insulating hexagonal boron nitride by capping the material with a monolayer of graphene.
The generation of strain in SnTe thin films due to lattice mismatch with the PbSe substrate can be used to tune the position of Dirac nodes in momentum space.
Atomically thin gratings, fabricated in single-layer graphene, can act as nanomechanical diffraction elements for high-contrast quantum interference of phthalocyanine molecules.
Capacitively coupled quantum dots can be used to realize a thermoelectric device that decouples the direction of flow of the electrical current from that of the heat current.
The position and orientation of a nanoscale object trapped in a fluid can be controlled externally, offering potential for information storage and logic operations.
Nanomechanical sensors can now function without the need to passivate the underlying cantilever surface because it is the area per receptor molecule on the surface that drives the complexation of ligand and receptor.
A hybrid approach combining mechanical force microscopy and infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy is used to characterize the morphological and compositional substructures of plant cell walls with a lateral resolution better than 20 nm.
Miniature optomechanical disks could be used as ultrafast and ultrasensitive fluidic sensors due to the combination of their high-frequency vibrations, small mass and low dissipation in liquids.