Microscopy articles within Nature Materials

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  • News & Views |

    Cysts were generated from organoids in vitro and the removal of adherent cues was shown to play a key role in polycystic kidney disease progression. These cysts resembled those of diseased tissue phenotypically and were capable of remodelling their microenvironment.

    • Paola Romagnani

  • News & Views |

    Energy-favoured grain rotation in nanocrystalline metals is shown to cause surface roughness at the atomic scale, providing fundamental insight for grain boundary engineering in materials design.

    • Jakob Schiøtz
    •  & Karsten W. Jacobsen

  • News & Views |

    By combining an electron-counting camera with low-energy transmission electron microscopy, it is possible to directly image the surface structure of delicate metal–organic framework crystals and their coherent interfaces.

    • Ben Slater
    •  & Sanliang Ling

  • Feature |

    Electron microscopy has seen a massive boom in China. Ze Zhang and Xiaodong Han discuss what this could mean for materials research and development.

    • Ze Zhang
    •  & Xiaodong Han

  • Progress Article |

    Advanced microscopy techniques provide unique insight into a material's structure. This Progress Article discusses how the application of big, deep and smart data to image analysis might permit the design of materials with advanced functionality.

    • Sergei V. Kalinin
    • , Bobby G. Sumpter
    •  & Richard K. Archibald

  • News & Views |

    The confinement and scattering lifetimes of graphene plasmons are improved when graphene is sandwiched between layers of thin hexagonal boron nitride. This finding should pave the way for nanophotonic applications in the low-loss regime.

    • Joshua D. Caldwell
    •  & Kostya S. Novoselov

  • News & Views |

    The visualization of organic-acid-induced crystal growth by means of liquid-cell transmission electron microscopy can provide key insights into the nucleation of calcium carbonate in an organic matrix.

    • Roland Kröger

  • News & Views |

    Using a scanning tunnelling microscopy-based method it is now possible to get an atomistic-level description of the most probable binding and contact configuration for single-molecule electrical junctions.

    • Richard J. Nichols
    •  & Simon J. Higgins

  • Article |

    Harnessing the optical properties of noble metals down to the nanoscale is crucial for fast information processing. Lateral confinement and delocalization of surface plasmons is now observed in self-assembled network chains of fused gold nanoparticles.

    • Alexandre Teulle
    • , Michel Bosman
    •  & Erik Dujardin

  • News & Views |

    Aberration-corrected electron microscopes are now being exploited to achieve quantitative atomic-resolution information about surface morphology from a single image.

    • Leslie J. Allen

  • News & Views |

    Knot-shaped micrometric tubes embedded in a liquid crystal induce the formation of defect lines that loop around the knotted tubes to form knots.

    • William T. M. Irvine
    •  & Dustin Kleckner

  • News & Views |

    Peaks of energy dissipation arising from distortions of a charge density wave have been observed by oscillating the tip of an atomic force microscope a few nanometres above a surface of a layered dichalchogenide.

    • Rubén Pérez

  • Article |

    Resolving the internal structure of water molecules adsorbed on solid surfaces is challenging. Submolecular-resolution imaging of individual water monomers and tetramers on NaCl(001) films supported by a Au(111) substrate is now reported. The molecular orbitals of adsorbed water were directly visualized, which lead to the discrimination between the orientation of the monomers and the tetramers H-bond directionality.

    • Jing Guo
    • , Xiangzhi Meng
    •  & Ying Jiang

  • News & Views |

    The application of imaging techniques prevalent in materials science to the biological process of soft tissue calcification lends new insight into age-related cardiovascular disease.

    • Jordan D. Miller

  • Article |

    Analytical techniques reveal that spherical calcium phosphate particles are the first mineralized structures to be formed in the calcification process in cardiovascular tissues. Furthermore, the inner sections of calcified lesions in patients with various cardiovascular diseases are identified as highly crystalline, spherical hydroxyapatite particles that differ in structure from bone mineral.

    • Sergio Bertazzo
    • , Eileen Gentleman
    •  & Molly M. Stevens

  • Article |

    Much less exploited than the spectral and spatial properties of surface plasmons (SPs) are their local density of states (SP-LDOS), which rule a number of important nanoscale phenomena. Using two-photon luminescence microscopy, the SP-LDOS in ultrathin gold nanoprisms is now visualized directly, allowing for the SP modal distribution to be tuned.

    • Sviatlana Viarbitskaya
    • , Alexandre Teulle
    •  & Erik Dujardin

  • News & Views |

    Improvements in electrostatic force microscopy now make it possible to measure the dielectric constant of isolated low-polarizable nanoparticles and viruses, thus enabling the label-free identification of dielectric nanomaterials of similar morphology.

    • Enrique Sahagún
    •  & Juan José Sáenz

  • Letter |

    The so-called pseudogap is a feature of high-Tc superconductors that has puzzled scientists since its discovery. It is of widespread opinion that this feature is associated with a structural symmetry breaking. Now, a highly sensitive scanning tunnelling microscopy experiment shows that a specific structural symmetry is not, as many believed, at the origin of the pseudogap state.

    • Ilija Zeljkovic
    • , Elizabeth J. Main
    •  & Jennifer E. Hoffman

  • Letter |

    The maximum imaging resolution in classical optics is limited to approximately the wavelength of light used, and subwavelength resolution can only be achieved by advanced imaging schemes. The appeal of the super-oscillatory lens optical microscope described here is that it enables subwavelength imaging with, in principle, unlimited resolution using a modified conventional microscope.

    • Edward T. F. Rogers
    • , Jari Lindberg
    •  & Nikolay I. Zheludev

  • Article |

    The relay mechanism in which hydrogen atom transfer occurs along hydrogen bonds plays a crucial role in many functional compounds. Using a scanning tunnelling microscope, the transfer of hydrogen atoms along hydrogen-bonded chains assembled on a Cu(110) surface is shown to be controllable and reversible.

    • T. Kumagai
    • , A. Shiotari
    •  & H. Ueba

  • News & Views |

    The imaging mode of scanning transmission electron microscopy known as annular bright-field has reached enough sensitivity to image columns of the lightest of elements within a crystal.

    • Philip E. Batson

  • News & Views |

    A study of nitrogen doping of graphene reveals the potential of high-resolution electron microscopy for imaging charge transfer around chemical bonds.

    • Knut W. Urban

  • Letter |

    Using boron nitride as a substrate for graphene has been suggested as a promising way to reduce the disorder in graphene caused by space fluctuations. It is now shown by scanning tunnelling microscopy that graphene conforms perfectly to boron nitride and the charge fluctuations are minimal compared with the conventionally used substrate, silica. Boron nitride could really be the natural graphene substrate.

    • Jiamin Xue
    • , Javier Sanchez-Yamagishi
    •  & Brian J. LeRoy

  • News & Views |

    Atomic force microscopy experiments on individual blood platelets reveal their dynamic contractile response to varied stiffness of the substrate.

    • Allen Ehrlicher
    •  & John H. Hartwig

  • Letter |

    Blood platelets aggregate to form clots that prevent haemorrhage. Knowledge of single-platelet mechanics is scarce, however. Atomic force microscopy experiments now show that platelets contract rapidly on contact with fibrinogen, and adhere strongly to multiple fibrin polymers, enhancing the elasticity of clots. These findings are relevant to disorders of platelet function, such as thrombosis.

    • Wilbur A. Lam
    • , Ovijit Chaudhuri
    •  & Daniel A. Fletcher

  • News & Views |

    The mechanisms of biomineralization remain hotly debated. Now high-resolution microscopy yields unsurpassed insight into mechanisms relevant both to the biomineralization of bone and teeth and to pathological mineralization.

    • Helmut Cölfen

  • News & Views |

    Developments in electron microscopy are generating more realistic views of catalysts, allowing optimization of their structure to improve their performance.

    • Chris Kiely

  • Letter |

    Why does the bandgap in semiconducting carbon nanotubes depend on the way it is measured? It is now shown that the results obtained by scanning tunnelling spectroscopy are usually influenced by screening, which creates the discrepancy with optical measurements. The results highlight the importance of many-body effects in the electronic properties of carbon nanotubes.

    • H. Lin
    • , J. Lagoute
    •  & S. Rousset

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