Volume 13 Issue 7, July 2018

Chris Toumey explores the potential of sound as a way to investigate nature at the nanoscale.

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.

Combined electrostatic gating and magnetic fields switch a 2D atomic crystal from an antiferromagnetic to a ferromagnetic state.

Long bundles of defect-free carbon nanotubes can exhibit exceptionally high strength.

Stable, sharp-bandwidth and upconverted stimulated emissions are generated from a 5-μm polystyrene cavity pumped by a low-power continuous-wave excitation.

New tools and approaches in hazard and risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials may pave the way to safe nanomaterial-driven innovations.

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.

Few-layer semiconducting Cr₂Ge₂Te₆ shows bipolar gate-tuned magnetism below its ferromagnetic Curie temperature.

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.

Energy-looping excitation in lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticles enables low-threshold continuous-wave lasing in stand-alone microcavities.

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.

Ultralong defect-free and well-aligned carbon nanotube bundles exhibit the highest tensile strength among known strong fibres.

Superconducting nanowires can be engineered to realize scalable coincidence detectors of single photons.

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.