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Grain boundary conductivity limitations are ubiquitous in materials science. Illumination with above-bandgap light is now shown to decrease grain boundary resistance in a model gadolinium-doped ceria solid ionic conductor.
The dissemination of synthetic biology into materials science is creating an evolving class of functional, engineered living materials that can grow, sense and adapt similar to biological organisms.
The exceptional quality of hexagonal boron nitride crystals that can be cleaved into few layers provides ultrathin dielectrics, thereby opening a route to ultrasmall capacitors with large capacitances. With such capacitors, the superconducting transmon qubit is scaled down by orders of magnitude.
A prototypical biocomposite block comprising a blend of bacteria, fungi and feedstock can be assembled into human-sized, living structures with self-healing and environmental sensing capabilities.
Mobile electrons dressed with the crystal electric field of localized f orbitals form a new type of quasiparticle in a rare-earth material with a devil’s staircase magnetic structure.
A composite membrane that contains porous organic cages is shown to be dynamic, with pore aperture diameter controlled by solvent allowing for graded molecular sieving.
Plastic yielding of metallic glasses is mediated by strain softening, which promotes localized failure and impairs engineering predictability. Unravelling the mechanisms associated with this plastic flow behaviour lays the groundwork for reliable engineering design of this elusive material.
This Perspective reviews the complementary developments in synthetic biology and biomaterials and discusses how convergence of these two fields creates a promising design strategy for the fabrication of tailored living materials for medicine and biotechnology.
Parallel-plate capacitors of the two-dimensional materials hBN and NbSe2 are integrated with aluminium Josephson junctions to realize transmon qubits with coherence times reaching 25 μs.
The liquid nature of hard glasses is demonstrated by broadband stress relaxation experiments. The rheology and dynamic transition of various glass systems can be unified by a universal scaling law in the time–stress–temperature–volume domain.
A multipole polaron, composed of a mobile electron dressed with a cloud of the quadrupole crystal-electric-field polarization, is identified in a rare-earth intermetallic.
Neutron scattering, electron spin resonance, muon spectroscopy and magnetization measurements are applied to evidence a quantum spin liquid phase in NdTa7O19.
Mobile excitons in metals have been elusive, as screening usually suppresses their formation. Here, the authors demonstrate such mobile bound states in quasi-one-dimensional metallic TaSe3, taking advantage of its low dimensionality and carrier density.
Gauge fields are essential for detecting and controlling quantum dynamical systems, but their potential has yet to be fully exploited. Here, the authors insert a single-unit-cell synthetic gauge flux into a sonic crystal with the gauge phase ranging from 0 to 2π, leading to topological Wannier cycles.
Grain boundary conductivity limitations are ubiquitous in material science. Illumination with above-bandgap light is now shown to decrease grain boundary resistance in a model gadolinium-doped ceria solid ionic conductor.
Stable solid–electrolyte interphases on Li anodes are crucial for reliable Li metal batteries. A suspension electrolyte design that modifies the Li+ solvation environment in liquid electrolytes and creates inorganic-rich interphases on Li is now reported.
Lithium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide is used as a conducting salt for rechargeable lithium metal batteries because of its stability, but corrosion with aluminium current collectors is an issue. A non-corrosive sulfonimide salt is shown to suppress anodic dissolution of an Al current collector at high potentials while improving cycling.
The separation of multicomponent mixtures is performed by distillation, as multiple-membrane cascades are too complex. Here, a porous organic cage composite undergoes solid-state transformation in solvent; this alters pore size, enabling graded separation of three dyes with a single membrane.
Lignocellulosic waste is transformed into fungal–bacterial biocomposites that can be processed into recyclable, human-scale structural objects with biosynthetic and sensing–reporting functionalities.
The influence of stress relaxation of the extracellular matrix on the formation of intestinal organoids was investigated. It was shown that a stress-relaxing synthetic matrix promotes crypt budding through increased symmetry breaking and niche cell formation.