Techniques and instrumentation articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    A lithographic patterning and release method is used to create a dense, fluctuating, Brownian system of mobile colloidal kite- and dart-shaped Penrose tiles over large areas that retains quasi-crystalline order.

    • Po-Yuan Wang
    •  & Thomas G. Mason

  • Article |

    Combining an electron microscope pixel-array detector that collects the entire distribution of scattered electrons with full-field ptychography greatly improves image resolution and contrast compared to traditional techniques, even at low beam energies.

    • Yi Jiang
    • , Zhen Chen
    •  & David A. Muller

  • Letter |

    Scanning tunnelling microscopy is used to distinguish between different active sites of a catalyst—such as boundaries between different materials—during a reaction, allowing the contributions of these sites to be evaluated.

    • Jonas H. K. Pfisterer
    • , Yunchang Liang
    •  & Aliaksandr S. Bandarenka

  • Letter |

    In situ infrared spectroscopy maps the occurrences of chemical bonds within tiny inclusions in 3,700-million-year-old metasedimentary rocks from West Greenland, finding greater evidence for organic life at this early date.

    • T. Hassenkam
    • , M. P. Andersson
    •  & M. T. Rosing

  • Letter |

    Techniques exist for imaging the magnetization patterns of magnetic thin films and at the surfaces of magnets, but here hard-X-ray tomography is used to image the three-dimensional magnetic structure within a micrometre-sized magnet in the vicinity of Bloch points.

    • Claire Donnelly
    • , Manuel Guizar-Sicairos
    •  & Laura J. Heyderman

  • Letter |

    A complete larval zebrafish brain is examined and its myelinated axons reconstructed using serial-section electron microscopy, revealing remarkable symmetry and providing a valuable resource.

    • David Grant Colburn Hildebrand
    • , Marcelo Cicconet
    •  & Florian Engert

  • Letter |

    A cryogenic thermal imaging technique that uses a superconducting quantum interference device fabricated on the tip of a sharp pipette can be used to image the thermal signature of extremely low power nanometre-scale dissipation processes.

    • D. Halbertal
    • , J. Cuppens
    •  & E. Zeldov

  • Letter |

    Holograms for sound waves, encoded in a 3D printed plate, are used to shape sound fields that can be used for the contactless manipulation of objects.

    • Kai Melde
    • , Andrew G. Mark
    •  & Peer Fischer

  • Letter |

    The incorporation of large numbers of chemically diverse functional components into microfabricated structures at precise locations is challenging; now the precision placement of DNA origami by directed self-assembly is shown to overcome this problem for the purpose of reliably and controllably coupling molecular emitters to photonic crystal cavities.

    • Ashwin Gopinath
    • , Evan Miyazono
    •  & Paul W. K. Rothemund

  • Letter |

    Cold-drawing of multimaterial fibres consisting of a brittle core embedded in a ductile polymer cladding results in controllable fragmentation of the core to produce uniformly sized rods parallel to the drawing direction for cylindrical geometries and narrow, parallel strips perpendicular to the drawing direction for flat geometries.

    • Soroush Shabahang
    • , Guangming Tao
    •  & Ayman F. Abouraddy

  • Letter |

    An alloy design strategy that aims for phase metastability, rather than phase stability, is described that will lead to the development of transformation-induced plasticity-assisted, dual-phase high-entropy alloys, which exhibit a rare combined increase in strength and ductility.

    • Zhiming Li
    • , Konda Gokuldoss Pradeep
    •  & Cemal Cem Tasan

  • Letter |

    Combining cavity-enhanced direct frequency comb spectroscopy with buffer gas cooling enables rapid collection of well-resolved infrared spectra for molecules such as nitromethane, naphthalene and adamantane, confirming the value of the combined approach for studying much larger and more complex molecules than have been probed so far.

    • Ben Spaun
    • , P. Bryan Changala
    •  & Jun Ye

  • Letter |

    Luminescence induced by highly localized excitations that are produced by electrons tunnelling from the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope is used to map the spatial distribution of the excitonic coupling in well-defined arrangements of a few zinc-phthalocyanine molecules and the dependence of this spatial distribution on the relative orientation and phase of the transition dipoles of the individual molecules.

    • Yang Zhang
    • , Yang Luo
    •  & J. G. Hou

  • Letter |

    Using single-molecule fluorescence imaging of photoelectrocatalysis, the charge-carrier activities on single TiO2 nanorods and the corresponding water-oxidation photocurrent are mapped at high spatiotemporal resolution, revealing the best catalytic sites and the most effective sites for depositing an oxygen evolution catalyst.

    • Justin B. Sambur
    • , Tai-Yen Chen
    •  & Peng Chen

  • Letter |

    Nanoscale radiative heat transfer between both dielectric and metal surfaces separated by gaps as small as two nanometres is characterized by large gap-dependent heat transfer enhancements that are accurately modelled by the theoretical framework of fluctuational electrodynamics and has important implications for technological design.

    • Kyeongtae Kim
    • , Bai Song
    •  & Pramod Reddy

  • Letter |

    Conventional clinical ultrasound imaging has, at best, sub-millimetre-scale resolution, but now a new ultrasound technique is demonstrated that is based on fast tracking of transient signals from a sub-wavelength contrast agent and has sufficiently high resolution to map the microvasculature deep into organs.

    • Claudia Errico
    • , Juliette Pierre
    •  & Mickael Tanter

  • Letter |

    An imaging method that combines small-angle X-ray scattering with tensor tomography to probe nanoscale structures in macroscopic samples is introduced and demonstrated by measuring the main orientation and the degree of orientation of nanoscale mineralized collagen fibrils in a human trabecula bone sample.

    • Marianne Liebi
    • , Marios Georgiadis
    •  & Manuel Guizar-Sicairos

  • Letter |

    Metal-organic frameworks have a porous structure that has useful applications in gas adsorption; here, small-angle X-ray scattering is used to visualize the process of adsorption as gas pressure increases, revealing that adsorbate molecules interact across pore walls in a way that allows extra adsorbate domains to be created in the framework and to form superlattices, before the adsorbate settles down into a more uniform distribution.

    • Hae Sung Cho
    • , Hexiang Deng
    •  & Osamu Terasaki

  • Letter |

    An efficient, cost effective microspectrometer that consists of a two-dimensional absorptive filter array of 195 different colloidal quantum dots is presented, and its performance demonstrated by measuring shifts in spectral peak positions as small as one nanometre.

    • Jie Bao
    •  & Moungi G. Bawendi

  • Letter |

    The coherent manipulation of electron quantum states using light, commonly employed in atoms and molecules, is extended to the case of free electron beams using ultrafast transmission electron microscopy; this approach may enable a range of applications in ultrafast electron imaging and spectroscopy down to attosecond precision.

    • Armin Feist
    • , Katharina E. Echternkamp
    •  & Claus Ropers

  • Letter |

    Isochron burial dating with cosmogenic nuclides 26Al and 10Be shows that the skeleton of the australopithecine individual known as ‘Little Foot’ is around 3.67 million years old, coeval with early Australopithecus from East Africa; a manuport dated to 2.18 million years ago from the Oldowan tool assemblage conforms with the oldest age previously suggested by fauna.

    • Darryl E. Granger
    • , Ryan J. Gibbon
    •  & Marc W. Caffee

  • Letter |

    Mapping the frontier-orbital interactions with atom specificity using X-ray laser-based femtosecond-resolution spectroscopy reveals that spin crossover and ligation determine the sub-picosecond excited-state dynamics of a transition-metal complex in solution.

    • Ph. Wernet
    • , K. Kunnus
    •  & A. Föhlisch

  • Letter |

    Two-dimensional titanium carbide has been produced by etching out aluminium in a lithium fluoride and hydrochloric acid mixture; it is hydrophilic and mouldable like clay and has excellent volumetric capacitance and cyclability, properties that are desirable for portable electronics.

    • Michael Ghidiu
    • , Maria R. Lukatskaya
    •  & Michel W. Barsoum

  • Letter |

    Recent advances in electron microscopy are shown to allow vibrational spectroscopy at high spatial resolution in a scanning transmission electron microscope, and also to enable the direct detection of hydrogen.

    • Ondrej L. Krivanek
    • , Tracy C. Lovejoy
    •  & Peter A. Crozier

  • Letter |

    New laboratory techniques for applying enormous pressures allow diamond to be compressed to 50 million atmospheres, providing insight into the interiors of planets and theoretical implications.

    • R. F. Smith
    • , J. H. Eggert
    •  & G. W. Collins

  • Article |

    Future rounds of nuclear arms control would ideally involve direct inspection of nuclear warheads using procedures that give inspectors high confidence about the authenticity of submitted nuclear items yet give no information about their design; this is now shown to be achievable using zero-knowledge protocols in neutron imaging of nuclear warheads.

    • Alexander Glaser
    • , Boaz Barak
    •  & Robert J. Goldston

  • Letter |

    The resonant interaction between γ-ray photons and an ensemble of nuclei with a periodically modulated resonant transition frequency can be used to control the waveforms of the photons coherently; for example, individual γ-ray photons can be converted into a coherent, ultrashort pulse train or into a double pulse.

    • Farit Vagizov
    • , Vladimir Antonov
    •  & Olga Kocharovskaya

  • Letter |

    An ultracold gas of erbium atoms is shown to have many scattering resonances whose quantum fluctuations exhibit chaotic behaviour resulting from the anisotropy of the atoms’ interactions.

    • Albert Frisch
    • , Michael Mark
    •  & Svetlana Kotochigova

  • Letter |

    In combination with sympathetic cooling of translational degrees of freedom (leading to Coulomb crystallization), cooling of the rotational degrees of freedom of magnesium hydride ions using a helium buffer gas leads to temperatures in a tunable range from 60 kelvin down to about 7 kelvin for a single ion, the lowest such temperature so far recorded.

    • A. K. Hansen
    • , O. O. Versolato
    •  & M. Drewsen

  • Outlook |

    Using a variety of creative imaging techniques, researchers are tracking the dynamic interactions of immune and cancer cells. Their results will guide drug development.

    • Katherine Bourzac

  • Letter |

    The unusual ordering of quasicrystals can be induced in thin films of a regular crystalline material; here a two-dimensional quasicrystal has been achieved by growing thin films of the perovskite barium titanate on an appropriately oriented crystalline platinum substrate.

    • Stefan Förster
    • , Klaus Meinel
    •  & Wolf Widdra

  • Letter |

    The enhanced reversibility (stable transition temperature even at high strain under a solid-to-solid phase transition), low hysteresis and unusual riverine microstructure (ranging through thermal cycles) of the martensitic material Zn45Au30Cu25 makes it attractive for applications from eco-friendly fridges to medical sensors.

    • Yintao Song
    • , Xian Chen
    •  & Richard D. James

  • Letter |

    Resonant inelastic X-ray scattering requires very high photon densities to detect the relatively weak signals of interest, but here it is demonstrated that inducing stimulated X-ray emission from crystalline silicon can increase the signal level by several orders of magnitude and reduces sample damage.

    • M. Beye
    • , S. Schreck
    •  & A. Föhlisch

  • Letter |

    A method of producing perovskite-sensitized solar cells by sequential — as opposed to single-step — deposition of the perovskite’s components onto a nanoporous titanium oxide film allows for greater reproducibility of device performance and a record power conversion efficiency of 15 per cent.

    • Julian Burschka
    • , Norman Pellet
    •  & Michael Grätzel

  • Letter |

    An innovative technique based on scanning tunnelling probes with integrated thermocouples is developed and used to measure heat dissipation in the electrodes of atomic and molecular junctions.

    • Woochul Lee
    • , Kyeongtae Kim
    •  & Pramod Reddy

  • Letter |

    Microwave spectroscopy is used to map the sign of an electric dipole Rabi frequency — which depends directly on the chirality of the molecule — onto the phase of emitted microwave radiation, thereby determining the chirality of cold gas-phase molecules.

    • David Patterson
    • , Melanie Schnell
    •  & John M. Doyle

  • Letter |

    Molten oxide electrolysis is considered a promising route for extractive metallurgy with much reduced carbon dioxide emissions relative to traditional routes; now a new chromium-based alloy has been developed for use as an oxygen evolving anode that remains stable in the high-temperature corrosive conditions found during iron production via electrolysis.

    • Antoine Allanore
    • , Lan Yin
    •  & Donald R. Sadoway

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