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Volume 5 Issue 6, June 2010

Volume 5 Issue 6

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 d2 I/dV 2 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 d2 I/dV 2 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.

Cover design by Karen Moore

Article p458

Editorial

  • Editorial |

    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.

Correspondence

Research Highlights

News & Views

  • News & Views |

    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.

    • John A. Rogers
    •  & Ungyu Paik

  • News & Views |

    Nanoscale glass can be switched between insulating and conducting states, allowing all-glass microfluidic devices to be made.

    • Jan Eijkel
    •  & Albert van den Berg

  • News & Views |

    A commercial atomic force microscope can be used to image solid surfaces in liquids and measure interfacial energies with atomic resolution.

    • Andreas Ruediger
    •  & Federico Rosei

Review Article

  • Review Article |

    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.

    • Gerasimos Konstantatos
    •  & Edward H. Sargent

Letter

  • Letter |

    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.

    • Natnael Behabtu
    • , Jay R. Lomeda
    •  & Matteo Pasquali

  • Letter |

    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.

    • Sanghyun Lee
    • , Ran An
    •  & Alan J. Hunt

  • Letter |

    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.

    • Johann Elbaz
    • , Oleg Lioubashevski
    •  & Itamar Willner

Article

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