Nanoscience and technology articles within Nature Materials

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  • News & Views |

    By exploiting subfemtosecond control of light pulses, researchers demonstrate an ultrafast logic gate based on the waveform-dependent photocurrent generated by real and virtual carriers in graphene.

    • Klaas-Jan Tielrooij

  • Article |

    Unlike electron spins, nuclear spins in van der Waals materials remain a largely untapped quantum resource. Here we report the fast coherent control of nuclear spins and strong electron-mediated nuclear–nuclear spin coupling in hexagonal boron nitride.

    • Xingyu Gao
    • , Sumukh Vaidya
    •  & Tongcang Li

  • Letter |

    Desired for optical sensing or visual communications, structural colour-changing materials are hindered by the lack of scalable manufacturing. Here, by adapting Lippmann photography, large-area manufacturing of colour patterns in photosensitive elastomers is realized.

    • Benjamin Harvey Miller
    • , Helen Liu
    •  & Mathias Kolle

  • News & Views |

    Understanding, at the atomic level, the effect of the stacking and twisting of different layered two-dimensional materials is a major challenge for the future of twistronics. Optical excitations evidence twist-angle-dependent whirlpool-shaped distortions in such materials.

    • Ado Jorio

  • News & Views |

    Individual fullerenes containing switchable electric dipoles have been demonstrated to function as single-molecule memory and logic at room temperature.

    • Douglas Natelson

  • Article |

    Single-molecule electronics provide the potential solution for high-density integration and low-power consumption in massive data-driven applications, but have yet to be explored. Here, the authors report low-power logic-in-memory operations, based on single electric dipole flipping in the two-terminal single-metallofullerene device at room temperature.

    • Jing Li
    • , Songjun Hou
    •  & Wenjing Hong

  • Article |

    Colour centre emission from hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) holds promise for quantum technologies but activation and tuning are challenging. Here, the authors show twist-angle emission brightness tuning and external voltage brightness modulation at the twisted interface of hBN flakes.

    • Cong Su
    • , Fang Zhang
    •  & Alex Zettl

  • News & Views |

    Dynamic recrystallization helps to refine grain structures in metals and tune their properties. Confining recrystallization within prior nanoscale twinning provides a path for reaching exceptional grain refinement.

    • Roland E. Logé

  • Review Article |

    This Review discusses the development of electronanotribology, its intersection with room-temperature ionic liquids and how such collaboration can be used to electrically control friction at the nanoscale.

    • Fernando Bresme
    • , Alexei A. Kornyshev
    •  & Michael Urbakh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Distinct electronic and optical properties emerge from quantum confinement in low-dimensional materials. Here, combining optical characterization and ab initio calculations, the authors report an unconventional excitonic state and bound phonon sideband in layered silicon diphosphide.

    • Ling Zhou
    • , Junwei Huang
    •  & Hongtao Yuan

  • Editorial |

    Materials scientists have played a key role in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the development of vaccines and diagnostic tools to the rapid prototyping of ventilators.

  • News & Views |

    Outstanding resistance to destructive radiation damage in structural alloys is realized by ultra-high-density reversible nanoprecipitate inclusions, and the improvement is attributed to the reordering process of low-misfit superlattices in highly supersaturated matrices.

    • Yanwen Zhang

  • News & Views |

    Wireless optoelectronic devices are fabricated by controlling the porosity of p-type silicon, enabling in vivo efficient, non-genetic optoelectronic modulation of peripheral nerve activity.

    • Silvestro Micera
    •  & Eugenio Redolfi Riva

  • News & Views |

    Sub-100-mV switching at the nanosecond timescale is achieved in ferroelectric devices by approaching bulk-like perfection in prototypical BaTiO3 thin films.

    • Morgan Trassin
    •  & Vincent Garcia

  • Article |

    Fabrication of semiconductor heterojunctions typically involves a complex process and often leads to bioincompatibility. Here, the authors propose a porous heterojunction in p-type silicon via simple stain etching at ambient conditions, and apply it in optically induced biomodulation.

    • Aleksander Prominski
    • , Jiuyun Shi
    •  & Menahem Y. Rotenberg

  • Article |

    Extreme mechanical deformation processes can lead to nanograins in many metals, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Nanotwinning-assisted dynamic recrystallization is shown to facilitate grain refinement to the nanoscale at high strains and strain rates.

    • Ahmed A. Tiamiyu
    • , Edward L. Pang
    •  & Christopher A. Schuh

  • News & Views |

    Electrically programmable Fourier-synthesized acoustic tweezers enable facile manipulation of micrometre-sized objects, colloids and living cells in a lab-on-chip device that combines high throughput with minimal invasive yet highly tunable force fields.

    • Hubert J. Krenner
    •  & Christoph Westerhausen

  • News & Views |

    Early time transient absorption microscopy in quantum dot solids reveals anomalous exciton transport with multiple different temporal regimes within hundreds of femtoseconds after photoexcitation.

    • Naomi S. Ginsberg
    •  & William A. Tisdale

  • Article |

    Nanometre-sized clusters can self-organize into centimetre-scale hierarchical structures, mimicking the complex constructions seen in nature and providing a platform to design synthetically directed advanced materials with sophisticated functions.

    • Haixiang Han
    • , Shantanu Kallakuri
    •  & Richard D. Robinson

  • News & Views |

    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.

    • Christian Schönenberger

  • Article |

    Semipermeable polymeric anion exchange membranes are essential for separation, filtration and energy conversion technologies such as fuel cells. Quasi-elastic neutron scattering is now used to disentangle water, polymer relaxation and OH− diffusional dynamics in a commercially available membrane.

    • Fabrizia Foglia
    • , Quentin Berrod
    •  & Paul F. McMillan

  • Article |

    Understanding exciton dynamics in quantum dots is important for realizing their potential in optoelectronics. Here, the authors use femtosecond transient absorption microscopy to reveal ultrafast exciton transport, enhanced at larger interdot distance and taking place within hundreds of femtoseconds after generation.

    • Zhilong Zhang
    • , Jooyoung Sung
    •  & Akshay Rao

  • Article |

    Metal oxide–zeolite bifunctional catalysts allow coupling of reactions and so enhance catalytic processes, but structure and reactivity control is difficult. Here, a general synthesis is presented for metal oxide–zeolite double-shelled hollow spheres, which outperform other catalysts for petroleum production.

    • Jiadong Xiao
    • , Kang Cheng
    •  & Bert M. Weckhuysen

  • Article |

    Symmetry breaking in colloidal crystals is achieved with DNA-grafted programmable atom equivalents and complementary electron equivalents, whose interactions are tuned to create anisotropic crystalline precursors with well-defined coordination geometries that assemble into distinct low-symmetry crystals.

    • Shunzhi Wang
    • , Sangmin Lee
    •  & Chad A. Mirkin

  • Article |

    In anisotropically shaped photocatalyst particles different constituent facets may form inter-facet junctions at their adjoining edges. Using multimodal functional imaging, inter-facet junction effects on anisotropically shaped bismuth vanadate particles are revealed.

    • Xianwen Mao
    •  & Peng Chen

  • News & Views |

    Heterogeneous microscale contacts between molybdenum disulfide and graphene or hexagonal boron nitride layers demonstrate ultralow friction independent of their relative orientation with residual drag that originates from edge effects.

    • Oded Hod
    •  & Michael Urbakh

  • Article |

    Colour centres are a promising quantum information platform, but coherence degradation after integration in nanostructures has hindered scalability. Here, the authors show that waveguide-integrated VSi centres in SiC maintain spin-optical coherences, enabling nuclear high-fidelity spin qubit operations.

    • Charles Babin
    • , Rainer Stöhr
    •  & Jörg Wrachtrup

  • Article |

    Controlled synthesis of heterostructured III-V–II-VI nanocrystals shows that dipole moments formed at the core–shell interface can tune the optoelectronic properties of these nanomaterials and their performance in light-emitting devices.

    • Byeong Guk Jeong
    • , Jun Hyuk Chang
    •  & Wan Ki Bae

  • News & Views |

    Centimetre-scale crack-free metal nanolattices are realized, enabling outstanding high tensile strength in low-density materials.

    • Andreas Stein
    •  & Nathan A. Mara

  • Article |

    A 3D-printing technique has been developed to create high-quality pure silica nanostructures with sub-200 nm resolution and the flexible capability of rare-earth element doping. It shows excellent application potential in three-dimensional micro- and nanophotonics.

    • Xiewen Wen
    • , Boyu Zhang
    •  & Jun Lou

  • News & Views |

    A seemingly disordered network of nanowires governed by thermodynamics is used as the physical ‘reservoir’ in a memristive implementation of reservoir computing to process spatiotemporal information.

    • Qiangfei Xia
    • , J. Joshua Yang
    •  & Rivu Midya

  • Article |

    Micromagnets dispersed in a polymer matrix are used to realize a soft magnetoelastic generator with high magnetomechanical coupling factor, used for wearable and implantable power generation and sensing applications.

    • Yihao Zhou
    • , Xun Zhao
    •  & Jun Chen

  • News & Views |

    A nanosensor probe that combines a tumour-targeting peptide, a diagnostic reporter and an imaging contrast agent enables early diagnosis, precision imaging, disease stratification and downstream therapeutic response monitoring of metastatic cancer.

    • Matthew Bogyo

  • Article |

    Layered clays are of interest for membranes and many other applications but their ion-exchange dynamics remain unexplored in atomically thin materials. Here, using electron microscopy, it is found that the ion diffusion for few-layer two-dimensional clays approaches that of free water and that superlattice cation islands can form in twisted and restacked materials.

    • Yi-Chao Zou
    • , Lucas Mogg
    •  & Sarah J. Haigh

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