Volume 6 Issue 4, April 2011

Coating solid-state nanopores with fluid lipid bilayers can reduce the translocation speeds of molecules and prevent the nanopores from clogging.

Electrons have been channelled through graphene wires using the principles of optical guiding by fibre optic cables.

A nanoribbon of a material with topological surface states has been used as the channel in a field-effect transistor.

A thin layer of double-stranded DNA on a gold surface can act as a spin filter.

What happens when the size of a metallic particle becomes smaller than the characteristic length scale for electron diffusion in that material?

A versatile method for the production of sheets of inorganic compounds with atomic thickness has been demonstrated.

Nanomechanical devices have the potential to probe biological processes at the level of single cells and individual molecules. This article reviews the issues that will be critical to the success of next-generation mechanical biosensors.

A gate voltage has been used to control quantum oscillations in Bi₂Te₃ nanoribbons and enhance the surface conduction.

Gate control of positive and negative carriers in graphene is used to guide current in a manner analogous to the guiding of light by an optical fibre.

The conductance of a single molecule can be reversibly tuned by mechanically changing the tilt angle between the molecule and contact electrodes.

Hybrid structures made of nanoporous gold and nanocrystalline manganese dioxide offer high specific capacitances and high charge–discharge rates, which makes them promising candidates for the electrode materials in electrochemical supercapacitors.

Insulating thin films with a random structure can undergo a nanoscale metal–insulator transition by making the film thickness size less than or more than the electron diffusion distance.

Nitrogen-vacancy-centre spin coherence can be used to detect two or more distant nuclear spins if they are strongly bonded to each other and to measure nuclear magnetic resonances of single molecules.

Geometrically well-defined graphene quantum dots can be synthesized by using ruthenium as a catalyst to open up C₆₀ molecules.

Coating the walls of synthetic nanopores with fluid lipids slows down the translocation of proteins, eliminates non-specific binding and prevents clogging, thus offering a way to improve the performance of nanopore-based sensors.