Surface patterning articles within Nature Chemistry

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  • News & Views |

    Mechanical force has recently become a new tool for chemists to create colours, trigger reactions, and develop advanced fabrication techniques not possible using other methods. Force-induced multiple colouring has now been developed as a printing technique in soft lithography, enabling the colouring of polymeric materials without inks.

    • Xiaocun Lu

  • Article |

    The properties of chiral conjugated molecules, such as the absorption and/or emission of circularly polarized light or electron transport, are highly anisotropic. Now it has been shown that templating layers can control the orientation and anisotropic properties of small chiral molecules in bulk thin films useful for a range of emerging technologies.

    • Jessica Wade
    • , Francesco Salerno
    •  & Matthew J. Fuchter

  • Article |

    The chemical modification of graphene is important for its use in many applications. Now it is shown that the reactivity of graphene towards covalent modification varies widely depending on its underlying support substrate, and that the substrate can be patterned to induce spatial control of chemical reactions in graphene.

    • Qing Hua Wang
    • , Zhong Jin
    •  & Michael S. Strano

  • News & Views |

    The self-assembly of molecules into porous two-dimensional networks on surfaces has been well studied in recent years, but now the concept has been extended to three dimensions with a little help from fullerene molecules.

    • Steven De Feyter

  • Article |

    The phosphoric acid fuel cell is limited by its slow rate of oxygen reduction at the cathode, but now an approach to the rational design of improved catalysts for this process has been developed. Molecular patterning of platinum surfaces with cyanide adsorbates is used to block the adsorption of spectator anions without hindering oxygen reduction, thus improving catalytic activity.

    • Dusan Strmcnik
    • , María Escudero-Escribano
    •  & Nenad M. Marković

  • Research Highlights |

    A heated AFM tip has been used to create nanoscale patterns of reduced graphene oxide.

    • Gavin Armstrong

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