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Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are renowned for their exceptional mechanical properties, and especially for being one of the strongest materials known to date. When assembled in bundles, however, their tensile strength drops significantly below that of single CNTs due to misalignment, defects and impurities. Now, Bai and co-workers have obtained centimetre-long CNT bundles fabricated via a synchronous tightening and relaxing strategy aimed to release the non-uniform initial strains of individual CNTs. The mechanical properties of this CNT-based material show a significant macroscale enhancement with respect to other reported strong fibres as evidenced by a record high tensile strength of 80 GPa. The artist’s impression on the cover image shows such an aligned and defect-free ultralong bundle consisting of many individual CNTs.
Nature Nanotechnology has asked Jong-Hyun Ahn, Yi Cui and Hagan Bayley, corresponding authors of the three papers published in the journal that have received the highest number of citations in the patent literature, to share their insights about doing applied research in academia and whatit takes to transform an idea into a viable technology.
Stable, sharp-bandwidth and upconverted stimulated emissions are generated from a 5-μm polystyrene cavity pumped by a low-power continuous-wave excitation.
Electrical control of magnetism in a bilayer of CrI3 enables the realization of an electrically driven magnetic phase transition and the observation of the magneto-optical Kerr effect in 2D magnets.
Electrostatic doping in vertical van der Waals CrI3–graphene heterostructures provides means to control the magnetic properties of monolayer and bilayer CrI3.
A superconducting thin film placed underneath a reconfigurable artificial-spin-ice structure in situ allows controllable geometric frustration with high degeneracy to be achieved.
A new superlattice fabrication process on 2D material heterostructures enables the observation of replica Dirac cones in graphene as well as Hofstadter’s fractal magnetic spectrum under triangular and square superlattice symmetries.
A switchable electrokinetic nanovalving mechanism is capable of isolating a wide variety of single nanoscopic entities, down to single macromolecules, from an ensemble, and guiding, confining, releasing and sorting them in a broad range of ionic salt concentrations, up to biological buffer levels.
Gate tunable and ultrabroadband third-harmonic generation can be achieved in graphene, paving the way for electrically tunable broadband frequency converters for applications in optical communications and signal processing.
A new non-van der Waals 2D material hematene, exfoliated from natural iron ore hematite, shows ferromagnetic ordering and enhanced photocatalytic activity.
Using a nanofabricated array platform to precisely control ligand organization at the single-molecule level, the authors illuminate the role of geometry in T cell receptor signalling.