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Developments in electron microscopy are generating more realistic views of catalysts, allowing optimization of their structure to improve their performance.
For a Ti alloy single crystal, the stress required for deformation twinning increases dramatically as the size of the crystal decreases, until at submicrometre sizes, deformation occurs solely by dislocation motion.
By using drug-encapsulating nanoparticles as the basis for electrostatic assembly, it is possible to generate highly functional films that do double duty. These adaptable thin films can be used both for releasing the drug in a controlled fashion and for biological imaging.
Opening a gap in graphene is still a considerable challenge on the path towards applications. A clever solution to this problem is to exploit the preferential adsorption of hydrogen in patterns that leave narrow stretches of pure graphene in between.
β-sheet stack structures in protein crystals are held together with some of nature's weakest links: hydrogen bonds. It turns out that the size of the crystal stack makes a difference to its strength — and smaller is better.
A solar-cell design based on silicon microwires achieves efficient absorption of sunlight while using only 1% of the active material used in conventional designs.
The observation of Aharonov–Bohm oscillations in nanoribbons of Bi2Se3 opens the way for electronic transport experiments in nanoscale three-dimensional topological insulators.
Conflicting observations of the speed at which various ferromagnetic materials respond to an external femtosecond laser excitation have generated considerable controversy. It is now shown that ferromagnets can be divided in two categories, according to the values of specific magnetic parameters.
Plasmonic structures are ideally suited to manipulate light on a scale that is much smaller than the wavelength of the plasmon resonance. This review discusses the applications arising from such extreme light concentration, which range from photonic devices and photovoltaics to localized thermal effects.
This review article surveys the potential of using plasmonic nanostructures to enhance the absorption of photovoltaic devices. As a result, the physical thickness of solar cells can be reduced, leading to new photovoltaic-device designs.
The formation of vortices in multiferroic hexagonal manganites, where the sign of electric polarization changes six times around the vortex core, points towards the origin of composite multiferroic domain walls.
Spin relaxation in organic materials is expected to be slow because of weak spin–orbit coupling. The effects of deuteration and coherent spin excitation show that the spin-relaxation time is actually limited by hyperfine fields.
Stable particle-like molecular architectures are written in a frustrated chiral-nematic liquid crystal using a vortex laser beam. This fundamentally new mechanism to form toroidal features with anisotropic optical properties has great potential to create new applications in liquid-crystal photonics.
By using an ionic liquid as a gate dielectric, superconductivity can be induced in an inorganic band insulator up to a temperature of 15 K by an electric field, opening new directions in superconductivity research.
Stimuli-responsive polymers can be engineered, in both film and colloid forms, to respond to a variety of inputs, from temperature to pH. The inherent flexibility in their structure and responses result in materials that lend themselves to applications ranging from drug delivery to sensing. Recent advances and future challenges in this direction are reviewed.
