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A prototypical biocomposite block comprising a blend of bacteria, fungi and feedstock can be assembled into human-sized, living structures with self-healing and environmental sensing capabilities.
Mobile electrons dressed with the crystal electric field of localized f orbitals form a new type of quasiparticle in a rare-earth material with a devil’s staircase magnetic structure.
The exceptional quality of hexagonal boron nitride crystals that can be cleaved into few layers provides ultrathin dielectrics, thereby opening a route to ultrasmall capacitors with large capacitances. With such capacitors, the superconducting transmon qubit is scaled down by orders of magnitude.
This Perspective reviews the complementary developments in synthetic biology and biomaterials and discusses how convergence of these two fields creates a promising design strategy for the fabrication of tailored living materials for medicine and biotechnology.
Upon decreasing the electron density in a two-dimensional electronic system to a critical value, a transition should occur from a quantum to a classical regime. An oxide now shows electrical properties marking such a transition.
Imaging the magnetic structure in non-centrosymmetric nanoparticles reveals the emergence of a new spin texture, the skyrmionic vortex, stabilized through a chiral geometric frustration.
Revealing the molecular orientations of anisotropic materials is desired in materials science and soft-matter physics. Now, an optical diffraction tomographic approach enables the direct reconstruction of dielectric tensors of anisotropic structures in three dimensions.
A simple one-step method that enables the random copolymerization of two monomers with different solubility in ionic liquids creates phase-separated elastic and stiff domains that result in ultra-tough and stretchable ionogels.
A generalized strategy to characterize the failure of truss-based microlattices is established, creating a framework for designing tough, damage-tolerant architected materials.
Molecular weaving is the entanglement of one-dimensional flexible molecules into higher-dimensional networks. This Perspective provides an overview of the progress so far, and discusses the future challenges and potentials of this field.
Despite its tiny magnetization, the non-collinear antiferromagnet YbMnBi2 is shown to possess exceptional transverse thermoelectric performance owing to its anisotropic transport properties.
Previous demonstrations of long-range supercurrents through magnetic materials were achieved only at liquid helium temperatures. Now, using specially tailored samples, long-distance supercurrents have been realized at temperatures as high as 40 K.
Epitaxial growth followed by topotactic reduction yields superconducting nickelate phases with the same hole-doping level as that obtained by chemical substitution, without causing structural disorder.
Glass-forming ability in metallic systems is related to the diversity of atomic packing schemes quenched into the glassy state, which manifests itself in the width of the first broad X-ray diffraction peak. This provides a swift way for screening libraries of deposited alloy films and searching for good glass formers.
