Nanoscale devices articles within Nature

Featured

  • Letter |

    A simply prepared quantum bit that is a hybrid of spin and charge enables full control on the Bloch sphere with π-rotation times of less than 100 picoseconds in two orthogonal directions; the speed arises from the charge-like characteristics, and the spin-like features result in increased quantum coherence.

    • Dohun Kim
    • , Zhan Shi
    •  & Mark A. Eriksson

  • Letter |

    A universal set of logic gates in a superconducting quantum circuit is shown to have gate fidelities at the threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computing by the surface code approach, in which the quantum bits are distributed in an array of planar topology and have only nearest-neighbour couplings.

    • R. Barends
    • , J. Kelly
    •  & John M. Martinis

  • Letter |

    Single magnetic atoms on non-magnetic surfaces have magnetic moments that are usually destabilized within a microsecond, too speedily to be useful, but here the magnetic moments of single holmium atoms on a highly conductive metallic substrate can reach lifetimes of the order of minutes.

    • Toshio Miyamachi
    • , Tobias Schuh
    •  & Wulf Wulfhekel

  • Letter |

    A computer built entirely using transistors based on carbon nanotubes, which is capable of multitasking and emulating instructions from the MIPS instruction set, is enabled by methods that overcome inherent challenges with this new technology.

    • Max M. Shulaker
    • , Gage Hills
    •  & Subhasish Mitra

  • Letter |

    Electric conductance through a narrow constriction of width comparable to the electronic wavelength is quantized in units of 2e2/h, but a shoulder at around 0.7 of the conductance quantum is often present in measurements; detailed experiments now confirm that this effect is due to the emergence of localized states that result from many-body interactions between electrons in the constriction.

    • M. J. Iqbal
    • , Roi Levy
    •  & C. H. van der Wal

  • Letter |

    A fundamental and previously unobserved aspect of the Josephson effect is revealed through spectroscopic measurements of the excited Andreev states in superconducting atomic contacts.

    • L. Bretheau
    • , Ç. Ö. Girit
    •  & C. Urbina

  • Letter |

    The quantum light–matter interaction between a superconducting artificial atom and squeezed vacuum reduces the transverse radiative decay rate of the atom by a factor of two, allowing the corresponding coherence time, T2, to exceed the ordinary vacuum decay limit, 2T1.

    • K. W. Murch
    • , S. J. Weber
    •  & I. Siddiqi

  • Letter |

    A continuous-wave Raman silicon laser with a photonic-crystal nanocavity less than ten micrometres in size and an unprecedentedly low lasing threshold of one microwatt is demonstrated, showing that the integration of all-silicon devices into photonic circuits may be possible.

    • Yasushi Takahashi
    • , Yoshitaka Inui
    •  & Susumu Noda

  • Letter |

    A hybrid approach to detecting individual defect spins in solids, whereby an optically induced spin change is detected electronically, offers the high fidelities required for quantum information processing devices.

    • Chunming Yin
    • , Milos Rancic
    •  & Sven Rogge

  • Letter |

    The diffraction of electrons through a nanoscale hologram that imprints a certain phase modulation on the electrons’ wavefunction produces a non-spreading electron Airy beam that follows a parabolic trajectory and can reconstruct its original shape after passing an obstacle.

    • Noa Voloch-Bloch
    • , Yossi Lereah
    •  & Ady Arie

  • Letter |

    The AWARE-2 camera uses a parallel array of microcameras to capture one-gigapixel images at three frames per minute.

    • D. J. Brady
    • , M. E. Gehm
    •  & S. D. Feller

  • Letter |

    A new family of resonators for nanoscale lasers is described that allows the size of the laser cavity to be scaled down without increasing the threshold power required to drive lasing.

    • M. Khajavikhan
    • , A. Simic
    •  & Y. Fainman

  • News & Views |

    Three-dimensional nanowire-like electronic devices are gaining ground over conventional planar technology. They may be the means to improve the performance of the electronic circuitry of the future.

    • Tomás Palacios

  • News & Views |

    Molecular machines containing related protein subunits are common in cells. Reconstruction of ancient proteins suggests that this type of complexity can evolve in the absence of any initial selective advantage. See Letter p.360

    • W. Ford Doolittle

  • News & Views |

    A long-standing issue in nanotechnology is how to connect molecular electronic devices. A method for splicing nanoscale wires made from different materials paves the way for a solution to this problem.

    • Dario M. Bassani

  • Letter |

    Use of nanomechanical resonators has the potential to offer microwave amplification with the minimum possible added noise, namely that due to quantum fluctuations.

    • F. Massel
    • , T. T. Heikkilä
    •  & M. A. Sillanpää

  • Letter |

    Use of a three-level system allows the Toffoli gate, an important primitive for quantum error correction schemes, to be implemented with many fewer elementary gates than was previously thought possible.

    • A. Fedorov
    • , L. Steffen
    •  & A. Wallraff

  • News & Views |

    Will a sense of touch similar to that of humans ever be developed in robots? Results on the physics of friction for fingerprint-like ridges sliding across textured surfaces may lead the way to tactile robotic sensors.

    • C. Mathew Mate
    •  & Robert W. Carpick

  • News & Views |

    Nanoscale systems designed to imitate functions from the macroscopic world lead to a new appreciation of the complexity needed to actuate motion at the limits of miniaturization. A nanoscale 'car' is the latest example. See Letter p.208

    • Paul S. Weiss

  • News & Views |

    An approach that entails printing compound-semiconductor ribbons on a silicon substrate offers the means to build nanoscale transistors that can be switched on and off much more effectively than their bulk analogues. See Letter page 286

    • John A. Rogers

  • Letter |

    A potential route to enhancing the performance of electronic devices is to integrate compound semiconductors, which have superior electronic properties, within silicon, which is cheap to process. These authors present a promising new concept to integrate ultrathin layers of single-crystal indium arsenide on silicon-based substrates with an epitaxial transfer method borrowed from large-area optoelectronics. With this technique, the authors fabricate thin-film transistors with excellent device performance.

    • Hyunhyub Ko
    • , Kuniharu Takei
    •  & Ali Javey

  • News & Views |

    Methods for trapping tiny particles are increasingly needed, especially for biological assays, but they often involve complicated apparatus. An approach has been discovered that could simplify matters considerably. See Letter p.692

    • Jan C. T. Eijkel
    •  & Albert van den Berg

  • News & Views |

    The resonant behaviour of clusters of gold nanoparticles has been tuned by gradually bringing the particles together. The approach could have many applications, including chemical and biological sensing.

    • Mark I. Stockman

  • Letter |

    Quantum entanglement is one of the key resources required for quantum computation. In superconducting devices, two-qubit entangled states have been used to implement simple quantum algorithms, but three-qubit states, which can be entangled in two fundamentally different ways, have not been demonstrated. Here, however, three superconducting phase qubits have been used to create and measure these two entangled three-qubit states.

    • Matthew Neeley
    • , Radoslaw C. Bialczak
    •  & John M. Martinis

  • Letter |

    Advances in nanomagnetics research have brought powerful applications in magnetic sensing technology, but so far no high-resolution magnetic-imaging tool is available to characterize complex, often buried, nanoscale structures. These authors have developed a scanning probe technique in which the intense, confined magnetic field of a micromagnetic probe tip is used to localize the ferromagnetic resonance mode immediately beneath the probe, and demonstrate that they can image magnetic features at a resolution of 200 nm.

    • Inhee Lee
    • , Yuri Obukhov
    •  & P. Chris Hammel

  • Letter |

    Metamaterials have the counterintuitive optical property of negative refraction index. They have a wide range of possible applications, including 'invisibility cloaks' and perfect lenses, but their performance is severely limited by absorption losses. These authors have incorporated an optical gain medium within a metamaterial as a way to compensate the intrinsic loss, and show that optical pumping leads to a significantly improved negative refraction index and figure of merit within the 722–738-nm visible wavelength range.

    • Shumin Xiao
    • , Vladimir P. Drachev
    •  & Vladimir M. Shalaev

  • Letter |

    Topological surface states are a class of electronic states that might be of interest in quantum computing or spintronic applications. They are predicted to be robust against imperfections, but so far there has been no evidence that these states do transmit through naturally occurring surface defects. Here, scanning tunnelling microscopy has been used to show that topological surface states of antimony can be transmitted through naturally occurring barriers that block non-topological surface states of common metals.

    • Jungpil Seo
    • , Pedram Roushan
    •  & Ali Yazdani

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Nanoscale devices across other nature.com journals