Reviews & Analysis

A membrane placed below the plane of an emitter and a receiver can interact with the radiative modes and modulate heat transfer by as much as a factor of five.

Desalination membranes based on the water transport through transient channels shows a new way to achieve high permeability and selectivity

Tellurium thin films evaporated at cryogenic temperatures facilitate the realization of high performance wafer-scale flexible p-type field-effect transistors and various types of logic gates.

The elusive Clar goblet, a magnetic, bowtie shaped nanographene is now synthesized and its peculiar magnetic ground state is characterized.

Nanostructures of electrically conducting polymers show plasmonic behaviour that indicates their promise as switchable optical materials.

The magnetic phase diagram of thin-layered antiferromagnets is revealed experimentally by investigating the tunnelling conductance as a function of magnetic field. A rich magnetic behaviour in CrCl₃ is uncovered, from which relevant magnetic information is extracted that is not easily available with other approaches.

The self-propulsion direction of enzyme-loaded liposomes is controlled by the activity of the ions in solution.

Composite electrodes made of nanowires and bovine serum albumin enable electrochemical protein biosensors that can be used in whole blood for a month or more.

The motion of a single electron can now be sampled with picosecond resolution, which helps to characterize and understand non-equilibrium electron dynamics in nanoscale conductors.

Photoresponsive hydrogel pillars can be conveniently tuned to achieve either phototropic orientation or phototactic swimming.

The mechanistic electrochemical mass spectrometry study of ethylene production on Cu-based nanocatalysts under CO₂/CO co-feeds indicates the existence of separate, reactant-specific surface adsorption sites for CO₂ and CO, which guided the design of a multi-component CO₂RR electrocatalyst.

Raman intensity fluctuations in single-molecule measurements can now be followed with megahertz temporal sensitivity.

Single-molecule devices with low variability can be made by decoupling electronic transport and chemical attachment to the electrode.

Energy-efficient magnetization manipulation is a prerequisite for competitive spintronic devices. The Weyl semimetal WTe₂ can act as a spin current source that enables magnetization switching of an adjacent ferromagnet at low power consumption and additionally induces chiral magnetism.

While heating a catalyst causes growth of nanoparticles through Ostwald ripening, repeated on/off high-temperature shockwaves can reverse the process, converting the nanoparticles into stable single-atom catalysts.

Coherent ultrafast spectroscopy of nanofocused plasmonic pulses strengthens the nonlinear response in graphene, highlighting the origin of a new general phenomenon.

A scalable manufacturing process for complex, high-quality superconductor/topological insulator structures could, in future, enable the production of topological quantum computation architectures.

Gate-based reflectometry enables single-shot spin readout in double quantum dots. This can help to reduce the number of gates necessary to operate a spin qubit and the per qubit device footprint, while allowing fast measurement — important characteristics for scalable quantum computing architectures.

The combination of a nanopore and an atomic force microscope allows stochastic sensing of secreted molecules and the activity of ion channels in arbitrary locations both inside and outside of a cell.

Nanoparticles designed to harness transcytosis achieve deeper tumour penetration.