Volume 18 Issue 3, March 2023

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.

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.

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

Topological magnetic monopoles are non-local spin textures that are robust to thermal and quantum fluctuations, but they are difficult to study at the nanoscale in real space. Now, soft X-ray vector ptycho-tomography is demonstrated to determine the three-dimensional magnetization vector and emergent magnetic field of such magnetic monopoles in a ferromagnetic meta-lattice.

Electrons in two-dimensional semiconductor moiré materials experience competing magnetic interactions. Magneto-optical measurements of moiré devices with controlled screening of the Coulomb interactions now evidence a Wigner–Mott insulating state with frustrated magnetic interactions.

A single DNA or RNA duplex can rotate unidirectionally when subject to an external electric field, generating sufficient torque to power rotary motion of larger nanoscale objects.

The authors identified the origin of LiH formation and a new method of LiF formation on a lithium metal anode, which is through the anion decomposition on the cathode side followed by crosstalk.

Electrostatically defined quantum dots in graphene constitute a testbed to study atomic and molecular physics in the ultrarelativistic regime—when the particle speed is close to the speed of light. Magnetic-field-dependent tunnelling spectroscopy experiments now reveal giant orbital magnetic moments and paramagnetic shifts in single and double quantum dots due to their relativistic nature.

Optically active semiconductor quantum dots have so far suffered from nuclear inhomogeneity limiting all dynamical decoupling measurements to a few microseconds. Lattice-matched GaAs–AlGaAs quantum dots now enable decoupling schemes to achieve a 0.11 ms spin coherence time.

Optical elements fabricated with a 3D printing technique generate beams carrying orbital angular momentum under incoherent white light illumination.

Covalent confinement drives symmetry breaking in macromolecular arrangements, giving rise to layered low-symmetry self-assemblies of mesh networks in the sub-10-nm scale.

Addressable DNA structures with lateral dimensions of ~2 µm can be self-assembled starting from over 1,000 distinct DNA-origami monomers via joint capture of the non-nearest neighbours.

Polymerase-chain-reaction-based methods used in clinic to identify respiratory viral infections cannot simultaneously detect multiple viruses or viral variants. Here nanopore nucleic acid sensing is coupled to programmable ribonuclease to simultaneously identify specific short RNA sequences of multiple viruses, without predetection steps such as sample purification or preamplification.

Catalyst microenvironment induced by mixed CO/CO₂ feeds in an alkaline membrane assembly electrolyser determines the catalytic activity and product selectivity in CO₂/CO electrolysis.

A donor–acceptor molecule assembles with different molecular packing to form photocatalysts which selectively produce either H₂ or H₂O₂, depending on the aggregate structure, a proof-of-concept of photoactivity polymorphism.