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Following a recession in the telecommunications industry, the appointment of Jeong Kim as president of Bell Laboratories comes at a critical time. Nature Materials spoke to him about his diverse career, his vision for Bell Labs, and the global environment the labs are operating in.
A new study suggests that the highest transition temperatures in cuprate superconductors occur when the materials are on the edge of instability to another, non-superconducting, ordered 'stripe' phase.
The approximation that a single potential energy surface can describe the reactivity of molecules is known to work well in the gas phase. Excellent agreement between theory and experiment for H2 reacting on a platinum surface now shows that this approximation is also valid for some reactions on metal surfaces.
Quantum dots have emerged as powerful materials to image processes and structures in biological systems. They have now been shown to produce photoinduced charge separation within cells which may become a tool for probing the redox state of cells.
