Physical sciences articles within Nature Materials

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  • News & Views |

    The prediction of interface structures is an uncertain and time-consuming task. A technique merging ab initio calculations with a genetic algorithm simplifies the process and provides suitable solutions of the atomic structures that would be hard to envisage a priori.

    • W. Craig Carter

  • Interview |

    Coherent synchrotron radiation has revolutionized the study of molecules and materials. Talking to Nature Materials, Gerhard Materlik, CEO of the Diamond Light Source, discusses the many uses of synchrotron sources and free electron lasers.

    • Joerg Heber

  • News & Views |

    Carbon nanotubes direct chemically produced thermal waves, providing propulsion and thermopower waves that create electrical energy.

    • Ali E. Aliev
    •  & Ray H. Baughman

  • News & Views |

    Patching carbon and boron nitride nanodomains emerges as an efficient way to engineer bandgaps in graphene, opening a new avenue for optoelectronic devices.

    • Angel Rubio

  • Editorial |

    The first demonstration of the laser has not only led to a myriad of commercial applications, but fifty years on basic research continues to rejuvenate the fundamental physics of the laser.

  • Interview |

    Charles Townes played a crucial role in the invention and realization of the first masers and lasers, for which he shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics. Nature Materials speaks to him about his historic contributions.

    • Joerg Heber

  • Interview |

    The quantum cascade laser has liberated laser properties from materials limitations, enabling light emission to be tailored over a broad spectral range. Nature Materials talks to Federico Capasso about the development of these lasers in his laboratory.

    • Joerg Heber

  • Interview |

    It was the realization of semiconductor lasers that led to the commercial success of lasers. Herbert Kroemer explains to Nature Materials his contributions to the design principle of these lasers, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.

    • Joerg Heber

  • News & Views |

    So far, flow-induced transitions and structures formed by the assembly of surfactant micelles have been reversible. Now, a microporous extensional flow process forms a permanent gel, which remains intact even after flow has stopped.

    • Matteo Pasquali

  • Article |

    The fact that cells sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their environment is now a well-explored concept, although the mechanism of this response is still unknown. Now it is shown that cells themselves can mechanically manipulate the materials surrounding them by pulling at connective points, providing a feedback loop to influence cell fate.

    • Nathaniel Huebsch
    • , Praveen R. Arany
    •  & David J. Mooney

  • Review Article |

    Transformation optics describes the capability to design the path of light waves almost at will through the use of metamaterials that control effective materials properties on a subwavelength scale. In this review, the physics and applications of transformation optics are discussed.

    • Huanyang Chen
    • , C. T. Chan
    •  & Ping Sheng

  • Article |

    Understanding the interaction of water with oxide surfaces at the molecular level could prove to be significant for controlling the catalytic activity of complex nanoparticles on insulating films. Two types of selective dissociation pathway involving electronic and vibrational excitation are now observed for a single water molecule on MgO thin films.

    • Hyung-Joon Shin
    • , Jaehoon Jung
    •  & Maki Kawai

  • Letter |

    Resistive nanowire arrays are intensively pursued as easy-to-fabricate memory technology, where data can be written and read through simple voltage–current operations. However, problems encountered in achieving stable switching independent of external influences has hampered their progress. The complementary, antiserial arrangement of two memory elements is now shown to lead to the desired stability.

    • Eike Linn
    • , Roland Rosezin
    •  & Rainer Waser

  • Letter |

    So far, the realization of negative-refractive-index materials has required the use of resonating metallic structures, leading to an inherently narrowband operation around those resonances. Here, negative-refractive-index materials are proposed that consist of single coaxial waveguide layers, with a negative refractive index at a broad range of visible wavelengths.

    • Stanley P. Burgos
    • , Rene de Waele
    •  & Harry A. Atwater

  • Article |

    Electronics that are capable of intimate integration with the surfaces of biological tissues create opportunities for improving animal/machine interfaces. A bio-interfaced system of ultrathin electronics supported by bioresorbable silk-fibroin substrates is now presented. Mounting such devices on tissue and then allowing the silk to dissolve initiates a conformal wrapping process that is driven by capillary forces.

    • Dae-Hyeong Kim
    • , Jonathan Viventi
    •  & John A. Rogers

  • Article |

    Despite recent advances in lithium batteries, fundamental issues of practical importance such as energy efficiency have not been adequately considered. A general model for the occurrence of inherent hysteretic behaviour in insertion storage systems containing multiple particles is now proposed.

    • Wolfgang Dreyer
    • , Janko Jamnik
    •  & Miran Gaberšček

  • Article |

    Peptoids are synthetic polymers designed to mimic the structure and functionality of proteins. When a one-to-one blend of two oppositely charged peptoids is mixed in solution, giant, 2.7-nm-thick free-floating sheets are formed. The sheets can specifically bind a corresponding protein, and offer potential for producing functional two-dimensional nanostructures in the future.

    • Ki Tae Nam
    • , Sarah A. Shelby
    •  & Ronald N. Zuckermann

  • Letter |

    Quantum transport phenomena have been widely investigated in semiconducting compounds, but extending these studies to oxides is not simple owing to their low mobilities. It is now demonstrated that SrTiO3 films can be grown by molecular beam epitaxy; the films show very high electron mobility, opening the way to oxide heterostructures with excellent transport properties.

    • Junwoo Son
    • , Pouya Moetakef
    •  & Susanne Stemmer

  • Letter |

    Solid-state materials showing giant caloric effects near room temperature could provide an alternative to cooling devices based on gas cycles. Strong emphasis has so far been dedicated to caloric effects induced by a magnetic field. It is now demonstrated that a small pressure applied to the compound Ni—Mn–In gives rise to a giant caloric response.

    • Lluís Mañosa
    • , David González-Alonso
    •  & Mehmet Acet

  • News & Views |

    By using drug-encapsulating nanoparticles as the basis for electrostatic assembly, it is possible to generate highly functional films that do double duty. These adaptable thin films can be used both for releasing the drug in a controlled fashion and for biological imaging.

    • Paula T. Hammond

  • News & Views |

    For a Ti alloy single crystal, the stress required for deformation twinning increases dramatically as the size of the crystal decreases, until at submicrometre sizes, deformation occurs solely by dislocation motion.

    • Oliver Kraft

  • News & Views |

    β-sheet stack structures in protein crystals are held together with some of nature's weakest links: hydrogen bonds. It turns out that the size of the crystal stack makes a difference to its strength — and smaller is better.

    • Christine Semmrich
    •  & Andreas R. Bausch

  • News & Views |

    Two deformation mechanisms, involving the cooperative movement of hundreds of atoms, explain the mechanical properties of complex metallic alloys.

    • Jean-Marie Dubois

  • Editorial |

    Japan's new frugal political leadership serves as a threat and an opportunity for Japanese scientists.

  • News & Views |

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

    • Chris Kiely

  • News & Views |

    Opening a gap in graphene is still a considerable challenge on the path towards applications. A clever solution to this problem is to exploit the preferential adsorption of hydrogen in patterns that leave narrow stretches of pure graphene in between.

    • Jeroen van den Brink

  • Letter |

    Approaches for controlling surface wettability and liquid spreading are numerous and diverse, but introducing directionality to the control of these phenomena is far from trivial. Nanostructured surfaces are now used to allow the propagation of a liquid in a single direction, while constraining it in the other three directions.

    • Kuang-Han Chu
    • , Rong Xiao
    •  & Evelyn N. Wang

  • Letter |

    The strong dependence of the magnetic properties on the growth conditions in (Ga, Mn)As has created the view that ferromagnetism is associated with an intrinsic inhomogeneity. Muon-spin-relaxation experiments now show that strong and homogeneous ferromagnetism is instead present in both insulating and metallic films.

    • S. R. Dunsiger
    • , J. P. Carlo
    •  & Y. J. Uemura

  • Article |

    Viscoelastic gels can be made by using flow to induce structure into solutions containing surfactant micelles. However, the gels disintegrate soon after flow stoppage. By using a microfluidic-assisted laminar-flow process to generate very high extension rates, it is now shown that permanent gels can be made, creating new opportunities for applications.

    • Mukund Vasudevan
    • , Eric Buse
    •  & Radhakrishna Sureshkumar

  • Article |

    Silicon-based lithium-ion batteries are attractive because in principle they offer higher specific capacities than conventional graphite. A hierarchical bottom-up approach is now used to prepare lithium-ion anodes with improved reversible capacities and stable electrochemical performance.

    • A. Magasinski
    • , P. Dixon
    •  & G. Yushin

  • Article |

    Counterintuitively, the exceptional strength of silks comes from β-sheet nanocrystals in which the key molecular interactions are weak hydrogen bonds. Simulations now show that nanoconfinement effects make β-sheet nanocrystals the size of a few nanometres stiffer, stronger and tougher than larger ones. These effects can be exploited to create materials with superior mechanical properties.

    • Sinan Keten
    • , Zhiping Xu
    •  & Markus J. Buehler

  • Letter |

    Several routes designed to induce a bandgap opening in graphene have been proposed. It is now demonstrated that hydrogen adsorption on the Moiré pattern induced by an iridium substrate can induce a bandgap of 450 meV.

    • Richard Balog
    • , Bjarke Jørgensen
    •  & Liv Hornekær

  • Article |

    An exothermic chemical reaction coupled with a one-dimensional conductor has been predicted to give rise to self-propagating waves with high thermal conductivity. This is now demonstrated experimentally with carbon nanotubes used as guides for the waves, which propagate with high thermal conductivity and with electric pulses of very intense power.

    • Wonjoon Choi
    • , Seunghyun Hong
    •  & Michael S. Strano

  • Letter |

    The strong coupling of light and matter is responsible for phenomena such as Bose–Einstein condensation. In a study of strong-coupling effects in semiconductor microcavities, the interaction between a two-level electronic system and a light field has now been observed.

    • J. Kasprzak
    • , S. Reitzenstein
    •  & W. Langbein

  • News & Views |

    A plethora of chemical tools is necessary for probing the surface reconstruction of a complex metal oxide.

    • Ulrike Diebold

  • Editorial |

    Light-concentration effects in photonic nanostructures, reviewed in this issue, promise new applications ranging from tumour therapy to catalysis and enhanced solar cells.

  • News & Views |

    A solar-cell design based on silicon microwires achieves efficient absorption of sunlight while using only 1% of the active material used in conventional designs.

    • Jia Zhu
    •  & Yi Cui

  • News & Views |

    The observation of Aharonov–Bohm oscillations in nanoribbons of Bi2Se3 opens the way for electronic transport experiments in nanoscale three-dimensional topological insulators.

    • Thomas Ihn

  • News & Views |

    Conflicting observations of the speed at which various ferromagnetic materials respond to an external femtosecond laser excitation have generated considerable controversy. It is now shown that ferromagnets can be divided in two categories, according to the values of specific magnetic parameters.

    • Markus G. Münzenberg

  • Letter |

    Multiferroics are promising for their ability to use an electric polarization to control magnetism and vice versa. However, ferroelastic effects during the switching of multiferroics such as BiFeO3 destabilize the ferroelectric state. A new approach for the switching of these sorts of compound may now represent a solution to this problem.

    • S. H. Baek
    • , H. W. Jang
    •  & C. B. Eom

  • Article |

    Despite having many similarities with graphene, single-layer boron nitride has a very large bandgap. Now, single-layer hybrids consisting of a blend of domains of boron nitride and graphene have been synthesized. By varying the percentage of boron nitride it is possible to tune the electronic properties, which is a very promising development for potential devices.

    • Lijie Ci
    • , Li Song
    •  & Pulickel M. Ajayan

  • Letter |

    While superconductivity experts investigate the fundamental properties of iron pnictides, it is worth wondering whether the properties of these materials are good enough for applications. A strategy for growing high-quality BaFe2As2 thin films shows that the use of an appropriate buffer layer allows very high critical currents to be reached.

    • S. Lee
    • , J. Jiang
    •  & C. B. Eom

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