Physical sciences articles within Nature Materials

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  • 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

  • Article |

    In comparison with the plastic deformation of regular crystalline materials, the mechanisms that govern complex solids with hundreds of atoms in a single unit cell are much less understood. An unusual defect mechanism in complex solids suggests the coordinated movement of hundreds of atoms, a result that improves the understanding of the deformation mechanisms in these types of material.

    • M. Heggen
    • , L. Houben
    •  & M. Feuerbacher

  • Article |

    Efforts in predicting crystal structures from first principles have mainly focused on the bulk materials. A general approach based on a genetic algorithm is now proposed to simulate grain boundaries and heterophase interfaces in multicomponent systems. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated in the case of grain boundaries in SrTiO3.

    • Alvin L.-S. Chua
    • , Nicole A. Benedek
    •  & Adrian P. Sutton

  • Article |

    As a liquid approaches its glass transition its dynamics slow down and simultaneously the material becomes more heterogeneous. A static structural heterogeneity, now shown to be widely present in glass-forming liquids, is suggested to be the origin of this dynamic heterogeneity that links structural parameters to the glass transition.

    • Hajime Tanaka
    • , Takeshi Kawasaki
    •  & Keiji Watanabe

  • Review Article |

    Plasmonic structures are ideally suited to manipulate light on a scale that is much smaller than the wavelength of the plasmon resonance. This review discusses the applications arising from such extreme light concentration, which range from photonic devices and photovoltaics to localized thermal effects.

    • Jon A. Schuller
    • , Edward S. Barnard
    •  & Mark L. Brongersma

  • Review Article |

    This review article surveys the potential of using plasmonic nanostructures to enhance the absorption of photovoltaic devices. As a result, the physical thickness of solar cells can be reduced, leading to new photovoltaic-device designs.

    • Harry A. Atwater
    •  & Albert Polman

  • News & Views |

    The formation of vortices in multiferroic hexagonal manganites, where the sign of electric polarization changes six times around the vortex core, points towards the origin of composite multiferroic domain walls.

    • Maxim Mostovoy

  • News & Views |

    Spin relaxation in organic materials is expected to be slow because of weak spin–orbit coupling. The effects of deuteration and coherent spin excitation show that the spin-relaxation time is actually limited by hyperfine fields.

    • Peter A. Bobbert

  • Letter |

    The use of silicon nanostructures in solar cells offers a number of benefits, such as the fact they can be used on flexible substrates. A silicon wire-array structure, containing reflecting nanoparticles for enhanced absorption, is now shown to achieve 96% peak absorption efficiency, capturing 85% of light with only 1% of the silicon used in comparable commercial cells.

    • Michael D. Kelzenberg
    • , Shannon W. Boettcher
    •  & Harry A. Atwater

  • Article |

    The origin of the effect that a magnetic field has on various electronic properties of organic semiconductors is still controversial. It is now shown that substituting hydrogen for deuterium in conducting polymers changes the response to a magnetic field substantially, proving the essential part played by hyperfine interaction in this effect.

    • Tho D. Nguyen
    • , Golda Hukic-Markosian
    •  & Z. Valy Vardeny

  • Letter |

    Resolving the surface structure and chemistry of oxides such as strontium titanate has so far proved difficult. Rings of six or eight corner-sharing TiO4 tetrahedra and a homologous series of surface reconstructions for SrTiO3(110) are now predicted.

    • James A. Enterkin
    • , Arun K. Subramanian
    •  & Laurence D. Marks

  • Letter |

    The mechanical properties of many materials are different on the nanoscale than they are in the bulk. In the case of metallic glasses, nanometre-scale samples show enhanced ductility. This tensile ductility has now been quantified for samples with diameters down to 100 nm, where a new regime of increased ductility during deformation is observed.

    • Dongchan Jang
    •  & Julia R. Greer

  • News & Views |

    Stable particle-like molecular architectures are written in a frustrated chiral-nematic liquid crystal using a vortex laser beam. This fundamentally new mechanism to form toroidal features with anisotropic optical properties has great potential to create new applications in liquid-crystal photonics.

    • Dirk J. Broer

  • Editorial |

    The opportunity of reaching a strong agreement on carbon emission cuts must not be missed again.

  • News & Views |

    By using an ionic liquid as a gate dielectric, superconductivity can be induced in an inorganic band insulator up to a temperature of 15 K by an electric field, opening new directions in superconductivity research.

    • Kosmas Prassides

  • Commentary |

    To deepen understanding and hasten the development of treatments, cancer needs to be modelled more accurately in vitro; applying tissue-engineering concepts and approaches in this field could bridge the gap between two-dimensional studies and in vivo animal models.

    • Dietmar W. Hutmacher

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