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The epitaxial growth of germanium on silicon leads to the selfassembly of SiGe nanocrystals with well-defined properties. Silvano De Franceschi and co-workers have now attached aluminium electrodes to individual nanocrystals to study the behaviour of holes in this system. They also make a hybrid superconductor-semiconductor device called a resonant supercurrent transistor by cooling their device below the superconducting transition temperature of aluminium. The cover shows d2I/dV2 as a function of the applied bias voltage V (vertical axis) and magnetic field (horizontal axis), where I is the current carried by the holes; high positive values of d2I/dV2 are shown in red, and low negative values in green. The oval structure in the middle is due to the opening of a superconducting gap in the aluminium contacts for values of the magnetic field around zero.
From fundamental physics and chemistry to digital cameras, improved displays and more natural lighting, nanoscale semiconductor structures called quantum dots are having an impact on many areas of science and technology.
Pyroelectric effects can be used to create attolitre droplets of liquid without the use of complicated electrodes, high-voltage circuits or nozzles, thus opening up new directions for printing and patterning substrates.
Colloidal quantum dots, metal nanoparticles and other solution-processed nanostructures exhibit novel physical effects and are easy to process, which makes them attractive for use in optical detection.
A commercial atomic force microscope can be used to obtain atomic- or molecular-level-resolution images and interfacial energy maps of hard and soft materials in liquids.
Graphite spontaneously exfoliates into single layers of graphene in chlorosulphonic acid, resulting in a solution that is an order of magnitude more concentrated than any previously reported, and forms a liquid-crystalline phase at high concentrations.
Glass undergoes a reversible dielectric breakdown under high electric fields at the nanoscale, allowing it to be used as an electrode for fluidic devices such as electrokinetic pumps.
A DNA-based computational platform can construct a universal set of logic gates and perform addition/subtraction operations in parallel, as well as activating multilayered gate cascades and fan-out gates, in a single test tube.
Different stages of amyloid aggregation can be examined by performing a statistical polymer-physics analysis of single-molecule atomic force microscopy images of heat-denatured β-lactoglobulin fibrils.
Pyroelectric forces are used to transfer liquids between two substrates and create patterns without the use of nozzles, electrodes or complicated high-voltage circuits, opening up a new route for manipulating liquids.
It is possible to sort polydisperse mixtures of single-walled carbon nanotubes to produce samples enriched in any of ten different (n,m) structures, and to separate the mirror-image isomers of seven different structures.
A nanoscale set–reset machine — the simplest logic circuit with a built-in memory — that operates at room temperature can be created by attaching a silicon nanoparticle to the inner pore of a protein.
Single holes can be confined in a SiGe quantum dot, allowing a range of spin-dependent quantum phenomena to be explored, and a resonant supercurrent transistor to be demonstrated.
In vitro studies using three-dimensional tumour models and mathematical simulation show that positively charged particles are better for delivering therapeutics to viable cells, whereas negative particles are better when deep tissue penetration is required.