Soft materials articles within Nature

Featured

  • Letter |

    The relaxation dynamics of granular materials is more like that of complex fluids than that of thermal glass-forming systems, owing to the absence of the ‘cage effect’.

    • Binquan Kou
    • , Yixin Cao
    •  & Yujie Wang

  • Letter |

    By exploiting geometric constraints and interfacial forces instead of chemistry, colloidal clusters can be controllably coalesced into particles with uniformly distributed surface patches.

    • Zhe Gong
    • , Theodore Hueckel
    •  & Stefano Sacanna

  • Letter |

    A polymer code based on a triplet of parameters—network strand length, side-chain length and grafting density—enables materials to be designed with specific combinations of mechanical properties to mimic biological materials.

    • Mohammad Vatankhah-Varnosfaderani
    • , William F. M. Daniel
    •  & Sergei S. Sheiko

  • Letter |

    Illumination of thin liquid-crystal polymer films that contain azobenzene derivatives with short thermal relaxation times induces a continuous wave motion throughout the films, owing to a feedback loop driven by material self-shadowing.

    • Anne Helene Gelebart
    • , Dirk Jan Mulder
    •  & Dirk J. Broer

  • Letter |

    A class of colloids is reported in which inorganic solute particles—such as metals and semiconductors—are dispersed in molten inorganic salts.

    • Hao Zhang
    • , Kinjal Dasbiswas
    •  & Dmitri V. Talapin

  • Letter |

    The self-assembly of colloidal particles into hollow micrometre-scale capsules is achieved through the combination of anisotropic particle morphology, deformable surface ligands that re-distribute on binding and the mutual attraction between particles, suggesting a design strategy for colloidal self-assembly

    • Chris H. J. Evers
    • , Jurriaan A. Luiken
    •  & Willem K. Kegel

  • Letter |

    Nanometre-scale cracks in a hydrophobic surface coating applied to hydrocarbon proton-exchange fuel-cell membranes work as tiny valves, delaying water desorption and maintaining ion conductivity in the membrane on dehumidification.

    • Chi Hoon Park
    • , So Young Lee
    •  & Young Moo Lee

  • Letter |

    Dense suspensions of hard granular particles can transform from liquid-like to solid-like when perturbed; a state diagram is mapped out that reveals how this transformation can occur via dynamic jamming at sufficiently large shear stress while leaving the particle density unchanged.

    • Ivo R. Peters
    • , Sayantan Majumdar
    •  & Heinrich M. Jaeger

  • Letter |

    Incomplete premelting at the edges of monolayer colloidal crystals is triggered by a bulk solid–solid phase transition and truncated by a mechanical instability that induces homogeneous bulk melting of the crystal; these observations challenge existing theories of two-dimensional melting.

    • Bo Li
    • , Feng Wang
    •  & Yilong Han

  • Letter |

    Chiral nematic liquid crystals are self-organized helical superstructures in which the helices can stand or lie, and lie in either a uniform or a random way; here, the helices are reversibly driven from a standing arrangement to a uniform lying arrangement and then rotated in-plane—solely by light.

    • Zhi-gang Zheng
    • , Yannian Li
    •  & Quan Li

  • Letter |

    Porous materials find use in applications such as gas separation, drug delivery and energy storage, but have hitherto been solid rather than liquid; now a combination of cage molecules and a crown-ether solvent that cannot enter the cage molecules is used to create a porous liquid that can solubilize methane gas better than non-porous liquids.

    • Nicola Giri
    • , Mario G. Del Pópolo
    •  & Stuart L. James

  • Letter |

    A general method of folding arbitrary polygonal digital meshes in DNA uses a routeing algorithm based on graph theory and a relaxation simulation that traces scaffold strands through the target structures to produce complex structures with an open conformation that are stable under biological assay conditions.

    • Erik Benson
    • , Abdulmelik Mohammed
    •  & Björn Högberg

  • Letter |

    Droplets of mixed water and propylene glycol deposited on clean glass exhibit a contact angle but do not suffer from contact line pinning; their motion can be controlled by the vapour emitted from neighbouring droplets to create a variety of autonomous fluidic machines with integrated sensing and motility capabilities.

    • N. J. Cira
    • , A. Benusiglio
    •  & M. Prakash

  • Letter |

    The temperature-sensitive miscibility of hydrocarbon, silicone and fluorocarbon liquids is used to establish a one-step method of making three- and four-phase complex emulsions with highly controllable morphologies that can be alternated between encapsulated and Janus configurations by varying the balance of interfacial tensions.

    • Lauren D. Zarzar
    • , Vishnu Sresht
    •  & Timothy M. Swager

  • Letter |

    Micrometre-sized particles covered with stiff, nanoscale spikes are shown to exhibit long-term colloidal stability in both hydrophilic and hydrophobic media, without the need for chemical coating, owing to the effect of the spikes on the contact area and, consequently, the force between the particles.

    • Joong Hwan Bahng
    • , Bongjun Yeom
    •  & Nicholas Kotov

  • Letter |

    Chemical force microscopy measurements show that the immobilization of specific cationic groups near non-polar domains produces pronounced changes in the domains’ hydrophobic interaction strengths: charged ammonium groups double interaction strengths, whereas guanidinium groups eliminate measurable interactions.

    • C. Derek Ma
    • , Chenxuan Wang
    •  & Nicholas L. Abbott

  • Letter |

    Usually materials design focuses on attractive interactions, but here a hydrogel is described whose properties are dominated by electrostatic repulsion between negatively charged titanate nanosheets embedded within it; the material, inspired by articular cartilage, deforms easily when sheared parallel to the sheets but resists compressive forces applied orthogonally.

    • Mingjie Liu
    • , Yasuhiro Ishida
    •  & Takuzo Aida

  • Letter |

    The unusual structures of quasicrystals, such as the 18-fold symmetry observed in polymer micelles, lack the repeating cell pattern of conventional hard crystals; here their origin is shown to be an extension of Penrose tiling with a simple, generic interparticle interaction.

    • T. Dotera
    • , T. Oshiro
    •  & P. Ziherl

  • Article |

    The idea that magnetic particles suspended in a liquid crystal might spontaneously orient into a ferromagnetic state has hitherto not been confirmed experimentally, but such a state has now been realized using nanometre-sized ferromagnetic platelets in a nematic liquid crystal.

    • Alenka Mertelj
    • , Darja Lisjak
    •  & Martin Čopič

  • Letter |

    Very slow cooling, over several days, of solutions of complementary-DNA-modified nanoparticles through the melting temperature of the system produces nanoparticle assemblies with the Wulff equilibrium crystal structure, thus showing that DNA hybridization can direct nanoparticle assembly along a pathway that mimics atomic crystallization.

    • Evelyn Auyeung
    • , Ting I. N. G. Li
    •  & Chad A. Mirkin

  • Letter |

    Different polymers can be used in combination to produce coexisting nanoparticles of different symmetry and tailored to co-assemble into well-ordered binary and ternary hierarchical structures.

    • André H. Gröschel
    • , Andreas Walther
    •  & Axel H. E. Müller

  • Letter |

    Magnetic fields micropatterned within a paramagnetic fluid can simultaneously trap and position both magnetic and non-magnetic microparticles, the latter including live bacteria.

    • Ahmet F. Demirörs
    • , Pramod P. Pillai
    •  & Bartosz A. Grzybowski

  • Letter |

    Topologically distinct colloidal particles introduced into a nematic liquid crystal align and generate topology-constrained three-dimensional director fields and defects in the liquid crystal fluid that can be manipulated with a variety of methods, opening up a new area of exploration in the field of soft matter.

    • Bohdan Senyuk
    • , Qingkun Liu
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • Letter |

    Active materials are hierarchically assembled, starting from extensile microtubule bundles, to form emulsions with unexpected collective biomimetic properties such as autonomous motility.

    • Tim Sanchez
    • , Daniel T. N. Chen
    •  & Zvonimir Dogic

  • News & Views |

    By controlling the placement of 'sticky' patches on particles, assemblies can be made that mimic atomic bonding in molecules. This greatly expands the range of structures that can be assembled from small components. See Article p.51

    • Matthew R. Jones
    •  & Chad A. Mirkin

  • Article |

    A general method of creating colloidal particles that can self-assemble into ‘colloidal molecules’ is described: surface patches with well-defined symmetries are functionalized using DNA with single-stranded sticky ends and imitate hybridized atomic orbitals to form highly directional bonds.

    • Yufeng Wang
    • , Yu Wang
    •  & David J. Pine

  • News & Views |

    Ion gels are composites of ionic liquids and polymers. Free-standing forms of ion gels have now been made that can be neatly cut with a razor blade and stuck onto semiconductor materials to make transistors.

    • Masashi Kawasaki
    •  & Yoshihiro Iwasa

  • Article |

    Magnetic quasiparticles in a doped quantum magnet are shown to be well suited for realizing and exploring the ‘glassy’ states that are predicted to emerge for interacting bosons in the presence of disorder.

    • Rong Yu
    • , Liang Yin
    •  & Tommaso Roscilde

  • News & Views |

    Hydrogels have many potential applications, but their mechanical strength is low. By simultaneously crosslinking two kinds of polymers in different ways, a highly fracture-resistant hydrogel has been made. See Letter p.133

    • Kenneth R. Shull

  • News & Views |

    Membranes have been made that are hygro-responsive — their wetting properties change when immersed in water. This striking property allows the membrane to separate emulsions into their oil and water constituents.

    • Robert W. Field

  • Letter |

    Hydrogels with improved mechanical properties, made by combining polymer networks with ionic and covalent crosslinks, should expand the scope of applications, and may serve as model systems to explore mechanisms of deformation and energy dissipation.

    • Jeong-Yun Sun
    • , Xuanhe Zhao
    •  & Zhigang Suo

  • News & Views |

    You can run across a swimming pool filled with a mixture of cornflour and water, but you sink if you stand still. Conventional understanding of this phenomenon is now being turned on its head. See Letter p.205

    • Martin van Hecke

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