Volume 14 Issue 11, November 2015

The coupling of the electronic structure of organic semiconductors with the electromagnetic field in the vacuum by means of plasmonic antennas allows for a mobility boost.

The unique properties of 2D materials, such as graphene or transition metal dichalcogenides, have been attracting much attention in the past decade. Now, metallically conductive and even superconducting transition metal carbides are entering the game.

The walls of microtubules can self-repair bending-induced damage.

An additive manufacturing technique makes heterogeneous composites with tunable local microstructure and composition.

Intrinsically disordered protein polymers can be designed to encode tunable lower or upper critical solution temperatures in physiological solutions.

Short-lived topological defects in active liquid crystals can exhibit long-range, long-lived orientational order.

This Review discusses stimuli-responsive liquid crystalline polymer networks and elastomers as materials with programmable mechanics for use in functional devices.

Electron tomography is used to create a 3D reconstruction of a tungsten needle that allows the positions of individual atoms to be localized with a precision of 19 picometres, without using averaging or assuming the sample crystallinity.

Capillary forces at the nanoscale can be harnessed for the magnetically directed assembly of lipid-shell-coated nanoparticles into ultraflexible microfilaments and network structures.

Experiments and coarse-grained simulations show, in an active system based on microtubules, a system-spanning phase of motile defects with orientational order that persists over hours despite a defect lifetime of seconds.

A Néel-type skyrmion lattice is found to be formed in the lacunar spinel GaV₄S₈—a polar magnetic semiconductor with rhombohedral symmetry and easy axis anisotropy.

The surface plasmon modes of periodic hole arrays in Ag and Al films enhance by one order of magnitude the conductivity and the carrier mobility of organic semiconducting films deposited on these structures.

Direct visualization of the motion of long-lived charge-transfer states in an organic blend reveals that bound electron–hole pairs stretch and contract, and diffuse more than 10 nm before they dissociate or recombine.

Chemical vapour deposition is used to grow stable, ultrathin crystals of α-Mo₂C and other transition metal carbides with lateral size up to 100 μm. α-Mo₂C shows a superconducting behaviour with 2D character, strongly dependent on the crystal thickness.

Understanding the mechanisms driving the formation of 2D and 3D superlattices at the atomic scale is difficult. An approach for direct mapping of Li-enabled octahedral tilt ordering and associated strain in nanostructured perovskites is now proposed.

Water splitting requires a semiconductor to absorb light and a catalyst to enhance the kinetics of electron transfer. An electrodeposition method to produce efficient photoanodes for the photoelectrochemical oxidation of water to oxygen is presented.

Experiments show that the progressive softening of microtubules under mechanical stress results from the enlargement of pre-existing structural defects, and that the incorporation of tubulin dimers can restore the microtubule’s initial stiffness.

Intrinsically disordered protein polymers can be designed to encode tunable lower or upper critical solution temperatures in physiological solutions.

An additive manufacturing technique combining an aqueous-based slip-casting process with magnetically directed particle assembly makes complex-shaped heterogeneous composites with tunable local microstructure and composition.