Volume 10 Issue 5, May 2015

Water desalination membranes can be created by etching nanometre-sized pores in a single layer of graphene.

Two-dimensional cathodoluminescence projections are used to reconstruct the plasmonic excitation of nanoscale crescents by tomography.

Nonlinear generation of light from an atomically thin semiconductor can be controlled by electrical fields.

A single layer of MoS₂ can be used to fabricate a memristor by exploiting structural defects in the crystal.

This Review discusses recent developments in photovoltaic and light-emitting optoelectronic devices made from metal-halide perovskite materials.

Memristors with gate-tunable charge transport characteristics are fabricated from monolayer MoS₂ by exploiting specific grain boundary configurations with respect to the electrodes.

Second-order optical nonlinearities can be controlled, up to room temperature, by electrostatic gating in a field-effect transistor made from atomically thin crystals of WSe₂.

An asymmetric plasmonic nanoantenna featuring a double resonant mode that overlaps with both the excitation fundamental wavelength and the second harmonic emission displays a remarkably large nonlinear coefficient for second harmonic generation.

Reduced titanium oxide nanotubes rapidly absorb and release molecular oxygen at room temperature.

Inorganic nanowires composed of gold(I) cyanide can be grown directly on pristine graphene, aligning themselves with the zigzag lattice directions of the graphene, and then used as templates to create graphene nanoribbons with zigzag-edged directions.

An optical tomography technique enables the optical properties of samples in three dimensions to be imaged with a resolution below the diffraction limit.

Optical excitation of graphene can generate a photovoltage in less than 50 femtoseconds, and can result in efficient electron heating.

A mesoporous carbon foam co-doped with nitrogen and phosphorus atoms shows bifunctional activity for oxygen reduction and oxygen evolution reactions and promising performance as an electrode in Zn–air batteries.

Two- and three-dimensional mesoscale superlattice crystals with precisely engineered optical properties can be assembled from the bottom up by using DNA as a programmable ligand.

An oxygen plasma etching process can be used to create a nanoporous graphene layer that can efficiently desalinate water.

TGF-β signalling, which is important in regulating various cellular processes during development, can be optically manipulated using near-infrared light with the aid of single-walled carbon nanotubes.

Using antibody-conjugated gold nanoparticles and a suite of techniques, the spatial location and type of protein binding sites across biomolecular coronas formed on the surface of nanoparticles are identified.

Hands-on challenges such as building a low-cost atomic force microscope for schools can teach more than standard lessons, says François Grey.