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Layered double perovskites are promising as solid oxide fuel cell electrodes because of favourable transport properties. Related layered materials are now used as high-performance anodes that exhibit redox stability when exposed to hydrocarbon fuels.
The lifting of valley degeneracy in the monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide WS2 is now demonstrated by the optical Stark effect, showing that each valley can be selectively tuned by up to 18 meV.
Soft acoustic metamaterials that consist of a concentrated suspension of macroporous microbeads and that show a broadband negative acoustic refractive index are now demonstrated.
The direction of the current photogenerated in organic–inorganic perovskite films can be switched by poling the material with low electric fields that induce a reversible ion drift. Hybrid perovskites may thus find application as memristor devices.
Optically detected magnetic resonance experiments show that single spins having a coherence time on the millisecond scale can be isolated in divacancy defects in silicon carbide at low temperature.
Defects in silicon carbide have recently been proposed as bright single-photon sources. It is now shown that they can be used as sources of single electron spins having long coherence times at room temperature.
Entropic elasticity, typical of rubbers and known to also occur in organic polymers with certain network structures, is now demonstrated for phosphate-glass fibres with highly anisotropic structures.
A high density of strong hydrogen bonds connecting two polymers that are homogeneously mixed in a thin film is shown to enhance the intrachain thermal conductance, boosting thermal transport in fully organic layers.
Three-dimensional analogues of graphene have recently been synthesized. The transport properties of such a Dirac semimetal, Cd3As2, have been studied, revealing an unexpected mechanism that suppresses backscattering dramatically.
Monolayer iron selenide grown on SrTiO3 has recently gained attention due to suggestive evidence it superconducts at high temperature. In situ electrical transport measurements now reveal a transition temperature above 100 K.
A new orthorhombic allotrope of silicon, Si24, is demonstrated using a two-step synthesis. Its structure contains open channels and it possesses a quasidirect bandgap near 1.3 eV.
It is shown that circularly polarized light produces enantiomeric excesses, above 30%, of twisted nanoribbons self-assembled from racemic dispersions of CdTe nanoparticles.
An applied voltage is shown to reversibly alter the magnetic anisotropy of an ultrathin Co film deposited on a GdOx dielectric layer, by switching the interfacial oxidation state.
Thermal resistance at room temperature is mostly due to scattering by defects and interfaces. Now, heat dissipation in cryogenic electronic devices is demonstrated to be due to phonon black-body radiation, without any scattering.
Memristors promise to emulate the appealing characteristics of biological neural systems. Solution-processed heterostructures are now shown to behave as memristive and memcapacitive switches compatible with printed electronics applications.
Photoelectron spectroscopy measurements uncover a singularity over a wide doping range in the cuprate superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ, suggesting a competition between the charge-ordering and the superconducting phases.
A bottom-up approach for producing metal–organic framework lamellae of micrometre lateral dimensions and nanometre thickness that can be incorporated into polymer matrices is now presented. These composite materials exhibit outstanding CO2 separation performances on exposure to CO2/CH4 gas mixtures.
The competition between colloidal interactions resulting from polymer bridging and polymer exclusion in polymer–colloid dispersions leads to their solidification both on heating and on cooling.
The morphology and mesostructure of the prismatic layer of a growing mollusc shell is observed by means of high-resolution synchrotron-based tomography and is shown to be fully predicted by classical theories of normal grain growth.