Nanoscale materials articles within Nature Physics

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  • Review Article |

    Moiré heterostructures have latterly captured the attention of condensed-matter physicists. This Review Article explores the idea of adopting them as a quantum simulation platform that enables the study of strongly correlated physics and topology in quantum materials.

    • Dante M. Kennes
    • , Martin Claassen
    •  & Angel Rubio

  • News & Views |

    Iridescent mother of pearl sports a complex structure that eludes standard imaging techniques. Now, a nanotomographic method provides high resolution 3D insight into the topological defects underpinning this composite material.

    • Rebecca A. Metzler

  • Letter |

    Three-dimensional structures of vortex loops in a bulk micromagnet GdCo2 have been observed using X-ray magnetic nanotomography. The cross-section of these loops consists of a vortex–antivortex pair stabilized by the dipolar interaction.

    • Claire Donnelly
    • , Konstantin L. Metlov
    •  & Sebastian Gliga

  • Article |

    The authors investigate out-of-equilibrium crystallization of a binary mixture of sphere-like nanoparticles in small droplets. They observe the spontaneous formation of an icosahedral structure with stable MgCu2 phases, which are promising for photonic applications.

    • Da Wang
    • , Tonnishtha Dasgupta
    •  & Alfons van Blaaderen

  • Article |

    High-quality WSe2–MoSe2 heterostructures support strong coupling between the two layers, which is associated with tight hybridization and effective charge separation. In these structures, the bands of the interlayer excitons can be pressure-engineered.

    • Juan Xia
    • , Jiaxu Yan
    •  & Zexiang Shen

  • Perspective |

    Hybrid devices of superconductors and semiconductor nanowires may be topological and host majorana. This Perspective summarizes the current situation of the field, and highlights the developments in materials science required to make progress.

    • S. M. Frolov
    • , M. J. Manfra
    •  & J. D. Sau

  • Letter |

    A memory device is proposed that uses a dynamical modification of the stacking order of few-layer WTe2 to encode information. The change in stacking modifies both the Berry curvature and the Hall transport, allowing two states to be distinguished.

    • Jun Xiao
    • , Ying Wang
    •  & Aaron M. Lindenberg

  • Letter |

    Placing two Bernal-stacked graphene bilayers on top of each other with a small twist angle gives correlated states. As the band structure can be tuned by an electric field, this platform is a more varied setting to study correlated electrons.

    • Cheng Shen
    • , Yanbang Chu
    •  & Guangyu Zhang

  • News & Views |

    Electrons driven through a suspended carbon nanotube by a constant bias excite mechanical vibrations — including self-sustaining oscillations — and, in some cases, even suppress them down to only a few quanta.

    • Martino Poggio
    •  & Nicola Rossi

  • News & Views |

    An experiment using ultrafast light pulses demonstrates how to induce a transient chiral electron state in a trivial semimetal.

    • Justin C. W. Song

  • Letter |

    Conventional on-axis electron energy-loss spectroscopy can detect vibrational modes in crystals and amorphous solids at atomic resolution by isolating the specific signal from the background signal and the dipole contributions.

    • Kartik Venkatraman
    • , Barnaby D. A. Levin
    •  & Peter A. Crozier

  • News & Views |

    Spatially resolved measurements of twisted bilayer graphene reveal more details of the strongly correlated electrons.

    • Adina Luican-Mayer

  • News & Views |

    Floquet engineering harnesses alternating fields to create a topological band structure in an otherwise ordinary material. These fields drive plasmons that can spontaneously split into chiral circulating modes and induce magnetization.

    • Luis E. F. Foa Torres

  • Letter |

    The authors predict that Berry flux can be spontaneously generated in a metal by plasmonic oscillations in response to illumination by light. They show that this topological ‘Berryogenesis’ can work in graphene.

    • Mark S. Rudner
    •  & Justin C. W. Song

  • News & Views |

    Through stochastic resonance, noise-driven fluctuations make an otherwise weak periodic signal accessible. Experiments have now reported quantum stochastic resonance, which arises from intrinsic quantum fluctuations rather than external noise.

    • Stefan Ludwig

  • Letter |

    Quantum interference between electronic pathways is generally difficult to observe in solid-state systems. Such interference is, however, now characterized in the second-harmonic generation from transition metal dichalcogenides, even at room temperature.

    • Kai-Qiang Lin
    • , Sebastian Bange
    •  & John M. Lupton

  • Letter |

    Electrons are confined to an artificial Sierpiński triangle. Microscopy measurements show that their wavefunctions become self-similar and their quantum properties inherit a non-integer dimension between 1 and 2.

    • S. N. Kempkes
    • , M. R. Slot
    •  & C. Morais Smith

  • Letter |

    Spin current is generated by pumping from nuclear spin waves. The nuclear magnetic resonance is used to transfer angular momentum from the nuclei of an antiferromagnet to a propagating spin current that is subsequently collected in a distant electrode.

    • Yuki Shiomi
    • , Jana Lustikova
    •  & Eiji Saitoh

  • Article |

    Neutron and X-ray scattering experiments show that the partly disordered material CsNiCrF6 supports multiple Coulomb phases with structural and magnetic properties dictated by underlying local gauge symmetry.

    • T. Fennell
    • , M. J. Harris
    •  & S. T. Bramwell

  • Letter |

    Spins are transmitted over a distance of 5 μm through a piece of antiferromagnetic graphene. This shows that graphene can be a platform to explore the fundamental physics of spin transport in antiferromagnets for application in spintronics.

    • Petr Stepanov
    • , Shi Che
    •  & Chun Ning Lau

  • Comment |

    The variety of emergent phenomena occurring at oxide interfaces has made these systems the focus of intense study in recent years. We argue that spin–orbit effects in oxide interfaces provide a versatile handle to generate, control and convert spin currents, with a view towards low-power spintronics.

    • J. Varignon
    • , L. Vila
    •  & M. Bibes

  • Editorial |

    The fledgling field of antiferromagnetic spintronics looks set to bring exotic forms of magnetism into the realm of practical applications.

  • Letter |

    Coupling strengths differ between neighbours in square artificial spin ices, resulting in the loss of degeneracy. Introducing mesospins on vertices of the array alleviates this problem, by tuning the strength and ratio of the interaction energies.

    • Erik Östman
    • , Henry Stopfel
    •  & Björgvin Hjörvarsson

  • Article |

    Nanomagnets are often used to build artificial systems that are geometrically frustrated, but when quasiperiodic ordering is introduced, an unusual ground state can form, with an ordered skeletal structure surrounding groups of degenerate macrospins.

    • Dong Shi
    • , Zoe Budrikis
    •  & Christopher H. Marrows

  • Letter |

    Atomically thin chromium tri-iodide is shown to be a 2D ferromagnetic insulator with an optical response dominated by ligand-field transitions, emitting circularly polarized photoluminescence with a helicity determined by the magnetization direction.

    • Kyle L. Seyler
    • , Ding Zhong
    •  & Xiaodong Xu

  • Measure for Measure |

    Wonder material graphene makes metrology practical and relaxed, says Andre Geim.

    • Andre Geim

  • Letter |

    Graphene systems are clean platforms for studying electron–electron (e–e) collisions. Electron transport in graphene constrictions is now found to behave anomalously due to e–e interactions: conductance values exceed the maximum free-electron value.

    • R. Krishna Kumar
    • , D. A. Bandurin
    •  & A. K. Geim

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