News & Views

A technique that blends micro- and nanometre-scale printed elements has been used to sculpture white light into a spatial array of coloured twisted beams, demonstrating sophisticated photonic control even with common incoherent sources of light.

An electric field gradient can be used to control spin qubits in silicon quantum dots, enabling switchable fast single-qubit gates and, potentially, scalability.

The self-assembly of a triblock bottlebrush polymer at one length scale controls the ordering of the self-assembly at a smaller scale, forming a hierarchical unit cell.

Nanosensors allow early detection of the onset and type of plant stress for a more precise and sustainable agriculture

The transport of dissolved ions inside tiny carbon nanotubes apparently violates the famous Nernst–Einstein relation, which links diffusive and electric-field-driven motion.

DNA chirality allows it to act as an electrohydrodynamical turbine under the action of an electroosmotic flow when confined in nanopores.

Manipulation of vacancy and strain enables fabrication of large area, phase-controllable 2D ferroelectric materials and their hetero-phase junction.

Combining equilibrium self-assembly with coupling mechanisms defying Newton’s third law allows for the design of programmable, time-varying, self-organized assemblies mimicking living matter.

Lorentz electron ptychography, a coherent diffractive imaging method, unveils magnetization singularities in a skyrmion lattice in FeGe and captures subtle internal structures near the skyrmion cores, boundaries, and dislocations.

By applying strain to artificially reduce the crystal symmetry of a non-centrosymmetric two-dimensional material, a very large bulk photovoltaic effect is uncovered with anisotropic properties that reflect its non-linear origins.

A multi-beam optical tweezer scheme achieves levitation and cooling of two nanoparticles at the same time.

A strategy that uses nanoconjugates to label solid cancer cells with the hematopoietic cell-specific molecule SLAMF7, broadens the scope of cancer types susceptible to immune-based anti-cancer therapies and could provide a new approach to treat solid cancers.

A doughnut-shaped microstructure with single-handed helical feature has been created via the combination of bottom-up self-assembly and top-down solution depositing processes.

Graphene Josephson junctions enable parametric amplification at the quantum noise limit with gate-tuneable working frequency.

Efficiency of Raman measurements is increased by nearly four orders of magnitude with the help of sub-wavelength plasmonic gap waveguides.