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The output mechanical energy densities of ferroelectric polymers remain orders of magnitude smaller than those of piezoelectric ceramics and crystals, limiting their applications in soft actuators. But polymer composites subject to an electro-thermally driven ferroelectric phase transition under low electric fields are now shown to have giant actuation strains and large energy densities.
A strategy of using a high ligand/metal ion concentration ratio eliminates lattice defects in polycrystalline zirconium metal–organic framework membranes, enhancing their molecular sieving performance.
A low-valence carbon-doped ruthenium oxide-based catalytic material achieved a catalytic trinity of superior activity, selectivity and stability during the conversion of carbon dioxide into methane at low temperatures.
In heavily hole-doped cuprates, superconductivity does not die by simply dissolving into a uniform metal due to the lack of pairing, but rather survives by shattering into nanoscale superconducting puddles.
Local vibrational modes at substitutional impurities in monolayer graphene are resolved with a sensitivity at the chemical bonding level, revealing the impacts of different chemical configurations and mass of impurity atoms on the defect-perturbed vibrational properties.
Antiferromagnetism has a vanishing total magnetization and thus is extremely challenging to manipulate. Now, circularly polarized light is shown to efficiently detect, induce and switch a unique class of antiferromagnets.
Locally confined epithelial malignancies undergo a phase transition from a solid-like to liquid-like state, a process called unjamming, where associated chronic intracellular strain causes nuclear envelope rupture, leading to the emergence of pro-metastatic traits due to cGAS–STING pathway activation.
Nanoscale ferroelectric topological solitons, such as polar bubbles, polar bubble skyrmions and hopfions, have garnered immense interest due to their emergent properties. This Perspective discusses how these structures form, advances in their study and how they can enable new devices and physics.
The discovery of ferroelectric switching in ultrathin layers of hafnium dioxide has aroused significant interest for low-power non-volatile memory technologies. This Perspective discusses how lessons learned from hafnium dioxide-based ferroelectrics can be applied to other applications, and other binary oxides.
Epitaxial topological heterostructures of (Bi,Sb)2Te3/graphene/gallium have been achieved using molecular-beam epitaxy, providing the opportunity to access Majorana zero modes in electrical transport when combined with van der Waals tunnel junctions.
Scientists have realized Weyl modes by exposing a topological insulator to large magnetic fields. Their effort enriches the toolbox to design, engineer and manipulate topological materials for physics research and materials applications.
The arrangement of magnetic ions between layers of NbS2 affects it as though a giant magnetic field is applied in different directions for electrons moving with opposite velocities. This discovery goes beyond the reach of conventional magnets, and opens up the way to custom-made effective fields engineered to guide materials into new territory.
Spectroscopic and structural measurements often give conflicting results about the role of disorder in determining the properties of energy materials. A hybrid neutron scattering technique is used to measure atomic correlations in time and space for cubic GeTe, revealing that anisotropic elastic interactions mimic disorder but the time-averaged structure is crystalline.
An artificial neuron architecture based on antiambipolar organic electrochemical transistors shows responses to biological ions and neurotransmitters akin to real neurons with comparable speed. The soft and more biocompatible nature of organic semiconductors could enable applications in brain–machine interfaces and in vivo sensing.
Using low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy on a MoSe2/few-layer graphene heterostructure enables localized exciton generation and mapping with atomic-scale spatial resolution.
