Volume 8 Issue 1, January 2009

Joseph Michels, a managing director at One Equity Partners, talks to Nature Materials about making private equity investments in high-tech companies in times of recession.

Using self-assembly and electrodeposition, complementary organic and inorganic building blocks are combined to form a lamellar hybrid that is an efficient photoconductor.

In semiconductor quantum dots, the electronic wave functions are squeezed into small areas. Stretching them in a controllable yet simple way profoundly affects their properties and can give them characteristics important for practical applications.

A simple nanoimprinting method creates arrays of ferroelectric polymer structures suitable for low-cost, non-volatile memories.

Mucus presents a formidable barrier to nanoparticle drug-delivery systems, but adding a coating of polymer molecules helps them sneak through the net.

Bridging the gap between theoretical and experimental work to understand the effect of plasticity on the crumpling of thin sheets into a small volume has proved difficult. A realistic numerical model now makes a distinction between elastic and elasto-plastic behaviour.

Understanding the short- and medium-range structure of metallic glasses remains a difficult challenge. The observation that the medium-range order has the characteristics of a fractal network may have broader implications in the understanding of the relation between structure and mechanical properties in metallic glasses.

Manipulating the properties of semiconducting nanostructures through magnetic doping can lead to interesting fundamental phenomena, as well as potential spintronics or memory devices. The demonstration that the magnetic properties of Mn-doped ZnSe dots can be tuned by adjusting the thickness of a CdSe shell represents a fundamental advance in the field.

A long-standing problem with molecular wires is their poor transport properties. Highly conductive and very long wires have now been synthesized by incorporating metal centres into rigid molecular backbones, which shows promise for their use in electronic devices.

Nanostructured high-surface-area materials capable of converting energy into mechanical work are promising for use as actuation devices. Surface-chemistry-induced changes of the surface stress in nanoporous gold are now observed on alternate exposure to ozone and carbon monoxide.

The growth kinetics and crystallization behaviour of DNA-directed colloidal systems are not well understood. Now, using experiments and simulations, a single nucleotide mismatch in DNA strands attached to two microsphere species enables the kinetics of crystal growth and segregation as a result of crystallization to be investigated.

It is now shown that femtosecond optical excitation can be used as a tool to investigate the spin-polarization properties of half-metals, and provide a clear distinction between those and metals. Such knowledge is of fundamental importance for the use of these materials in spintronics applications.

Ferroelectric polymers are of interest for use as memory devices for all-organic electronics applications. A fast and efficient embossing technology is now shown not only to lead to high-density arrays of ferroelectric nanocells but also to significantly improve the ferroelectric properties of these structures.

Electronically active materials made by the self-assembly of alternating layers of zinc oxide and conjugated molecules directly onto an electrode combine the advantages of their inorganic and organic components. They are shown to be stable photoconductors with promising device characteristics.

Hydrogen generated from splitting water using a catalyst and solar energy is an ideal energy source. A polymeric carbon nitride photocatalyst that is thermally and chemically stable is now shown to produce hydrogen from water even in the absence of noble metal catalysts.