Volume 10 Issue 11, November 2015

A checklist for solar cell articles.

The submission of the first 'smart pill' for market approval, combined with progress in the European nanomedicine landscape, illustrates the positive outlook for drug therapy and health monitoring, explains Christian Martin.

High-transmission metasurfaces based on elliptical silicon rods provide a simple approach to engineering the phase and polarization of light.

The basic building block of a Hund's metal can be constructed from an iron atom adsorbed on a platinum surface and can be probed with a scanning tunnelling microscope.

The photocurrent generated at the boundary between structural phases of bismuth ferrite reveals information on the coupling between mechanical and electrical phenomena.

Recent theoretical advances are starting to elucidate how natural systems use dissipative self-assembly to build their complex nanomachinery and might point to ways in which the same principles can be exploited to fabricate analogous artificial nanoassemblies.

This Review describes the challenges in functionalization of upconversion nanocrystals for applications in multimodal imaging, cancer therapy, volumetric displays and photonics.

Silicon pillars with elliptical cross-section are used to fabricate efficient metasurfaces that allow simultaneous control of the phase and polarization of the transmitted electromagnetic radiation.

Thin-film transistors made from solution-processed single-walled carbon nanotubes are used to fabricate large-scale integrated arrays of complementary static random access memory cells.

The scanning tunnelling microscope can be used to image and manipulate individual defects in bulk insulating hexagonal boron nitride by capping the material with a monolayer of graphene.

Clathrin, a three-legged protein complex, can form regular two-dimensional lattices on a variety of substrates. These lattices can be functionalized with nanoparticles or enzymes for sensing applications.

A single iron atom adsorbed on a platinum surface can act as the basic constituent of a Hund's metal—known as a Hund's impurity—and its magnetic properties can be probed and manipulated using the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope.

Large-area graphene devices synthesized by chemical vapour deposition are used to develop electrical resistance standards, based on the quantum Hall effect, with state-of-the-art accuracy and under an extended range of experimental conditions of magnetic field, temperature and current.

The photocurrent in polymorphic phase areas of BiFeO₃ is enhanced by a factor of 100 due to interfacial strain gradients across the different structural phases.

The sodiation–desodiation properties of few-layer phosphorene are mostly preserved by sandwiching the material between graphene layers, a behaviour that makes phosphorene–graphene hybrids a potentially suitable anode material for sodium-ion batteries.

The discrimination of nucleic acid sequences and the detection of sequence-specific nucleic acid binding events by protein nanopores can be parallelized by optically encoding the ionic flux through the pores.

Philip S. Lukeman and Stefan Howorka provide a training programme to improve the interdisciplinary breadth and depth of a nanoscience research group.