Volume 17 Issue 10, October 2018

Space missions require materials that can preserve functional integrity under extreme conditions of heat, impact and radiation. This Comment outlines the materials properties needed for some of the most ambitious space missions and presents the design and testing principles before their incorporation.

Physicists are searching for superconducting materials that can host Majoranas. New evidence for these elusive particles is provided by missing Shapiro steps in a Josephson effect mediated by an accidental Dirac semimetal.

A graphite and hexagonal boron nitride heterojunction enables superlubric sliding, almost independent of alignment orientation, in micrometre-sized contacts under ‘real-life’ working conditions.

The metallic state of an iron chalcogenide superconductor is demonstrated to be characterized by the simultaneous presence of itinerant carriers with different degrees of correlation. This orbital-selective metal arises from a sizeable Hund’s coupling.

Multiscale modelling provides atomic-level insights into how oxygen vacancy defect nucleation leads to the formation of the visible light photocatalyst black titania.

Micromilling gem-quality diamond tips into a toroidal shape has been shown to greatly extend the accessible pressure range of standard diamond anvil cells, opening the way for studies in extreme physics of high-density matter.

This Perspective explores the optical, mechanical and thermal properties required to successfully design an ultralight spacecraft that can reach Proxima Centauri b, which is the goal of the Starshot Breakthrough Initiative.

Orbital-selective quasiparticle interference is imaged in the Hund’s metal parent state of iron-based superconductivity.

Superconductivity is induced in an accidental Dirac semimetal via the proximity effect.

Molecular dynamic simulations reveal that the rapid crystal growth in pure metals is governed by a barrierless ordering process, correlating to the inherent crystalline structure in the liquid at the growth interface.

The model alloy of Au–Ag is studied to decouple the role of stress and corrosion in intergranular cracking caused by metal dissolution. Nanoporous corrosion layers can mechanically inject a crack into grain boundaries of the parent phase.

Robust structural superlubricity is experimentally realized in microscale monocrystalline graphite/hBN heterojunctions. The friction anisotropy upon crystal reorientation is orders of magnitude smaller than that of homogeneous graphite contacts.

A systematic analysis is performed to reveal how deposition conditions and the use of cations and solvents affect the composition and orientation of 2D and quasi-2D metal halide perovskites in thin films.

Reversible structural surface relaxation under laser exposure is observed for monolayers of 2D metal halide perovskites. These structural changes also induce reversible shifts in the photoluminescence peaks of these materials.

Phase transformations driven by compositional change require mass flux across a phase boundary. Lithium migration in Li_XFePO₄ along the solid/liquid interface now suggests that surface diffusion contributes to tuning phase transformation in anisotropic solids.

The nature of structural disorder in photocatalytic black TiO₂ is not known. Here, using simulations, it is shown that water formation drives surface reduction, with slowly migrating oxygen vacancies at the {001} facets resulting in the nucleation of disorder.

Magnetocaloric effects can be used for refrigeration, but application uptake is limited due to large amounts of magnetic material used. Here, a cooling cycle is shown that uses thermal hysteresis, significantly reducing magnetic material quantity.

Ultrafast water transport in the surface of Sarracenia trichome is reported and demonstrated in synthetic bioinspired materials, where nano- and microchannels induce high-speed sliding of droplets on top of a thin water film.