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Smart surface with tunable properties is vital for modern intelligent applications. Here we demonstrate a novel surface that enables fast surface changing based on a bioinspired micro-air-sacs network. The pneumatic smart surface allows for rapid and large-amplitude topography deformation through pneumatic control, and permits dynamic wettability switching between dominant and latent states. A smart surface with contrastive rose-petal-like and lotus-leaf-like wetting characters is presented and utilized as a droplet manipulator for in situ capture and release of water droplets on demand.
NaCl-assisted APCVD technique to synthesize multi-stacked MoS2 crystals with different stacking orientations and shape has been developed. We found that the stacking orientation of multi-stacked MoS2 crystals shows the underlying variation in the crystalline phases, symmetry inversion, spin–orbit coupling and interlayer interactions through intensive optical study based on Raman spectroscopy, PL spectroscopy and nonlinear technique of FWM correlated SHG imaging technique. Our study based on the crystals with different shape and multiple stacking configurations provide a new avenue for the possibilities of future optoelectronic devices.
Using functionalized particles for treatment of cancer is advantageous because they can access remote parts of the body and is minimally invasive. However, current chemical and biological methods still face challenges. A novel approach that uses the physical force of stimuli-responsive hydrogels is introduced. Temperature-responsive hydrogels were coated with cell-adherent molecules. After attaching cancer cells on its surface and changing the temperature, the force of the expanding stimuli-responsive hydrogel ruptures the cells. Comparing to other chemical and biological methods, this physical approach may be conceptually simpler, technically easier to implement, and more general for different types of cancer cells.
We introduce a mechanism that can result in metallicity at stoichiometric interphase boundaries between semiconductors, based on the idea of polar catastrophe induced by charge density discontinuity. As an example, we demonstrate metallicity at the stoichiometric (110) interphase boundary of the semiconductors SnO and SnO2. The proposed mechanism is of general validity and expected to have an important role at interphase boundaries between polar materials.
Quasi-free-standing trilayer graphene with ABA or ABC stacking was selectively synthesized on hydrogen-terminated silicon carbide. The electronic structure was investigated by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. While ABA graphene exhibits a massless Dirac-cone-like band at the K point in the Brillouin zone, ABC graphene was found to show a parabolic non-Dirac-like band. The present success in selective fabrication of ABA and ABC graphene would open a pathway toward graphene-based nano electronic devices with variable layer number and stacking sequence such as high-speed transistor and photodetector.
The built Cu2S/MnSe heterostructures belong to a novel type of Chern insulators, owning unique half-metallic chiral edge states and a very high Fermi velocity (0.87 × 106 m s−1). The full spin-polarization of the edge states is found to be robust against the tuning of chemical potential. This heterostructure has quadratic bands with normal band order, that is, the p/d-like band is below the s-like band. Charge transfer between the Cu2S and the substrate causes the variation of the occupied bands, which together with the spin–orbit coupling triggers the exotic topological state in the system.
