Condensed-matter physics articles within Nature Materials

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  • Article |

    The authors report coexisting ferromagnetism, polar distortion and metallicity in quasi-two-dimensional Ca3Co3O8, providing a platform to exploit magnetoelectric coupling in a metallic system.

    • Jianbing Zhang
    • , Shengchun Shen
    •  & Pu Yu

  • News & Views |

    Better control over the quality of materials dissipates doubts about charge order in infinite-layer nickelates and indicates that a previously observed superstructure is probably a spurious effect related to other crystalline phases. This finding strengthens the similarities between nickelates and cuprates.

    • Giacomo Ghiringhelli

  • Review Article |

    Non-layered transition metal carbides (TMCs) and layered transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) can form various heterostructure configurations through chemical conversion. This Review highlights the progress in the fabrication and control of TMC/TMD heterostructures and the exotic properties arising from these interfaces.

    • Alexander J. Sredenschek
    • , David Emanuel Sanchez
    •  & Mauricio Terrones

  • Research Briefing |

    Electrocaloric effects have not hitherto been experimentally studied at a phase transition created by strain. It is now shown that the continuous transition created by epitaxial strain in strontium titanate films greatly enhances electrocaloric effects over a wide range of temperatures, including room temperature.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electrocaloric effects are large in a limited set of materials that display hysteretic first-order phase transitions. Here epitaxial SrTiO3 thin films are strain engineered to achieve anhysteretic second-order phase transitions, with electrocaloric effects enhanced by one order of magnitude over bulk.

    • S. Zhang
    • , J. Deliyore-Ramírez
    •  & N. D. Mathur

  • News & Views |

    Restricting the directional segregation of mobile ions via strategic local ion confinement allows remarkable thermoelectric performance with better stability.

    • Animesh Bhui
    •  & Kanishka Biswas

  • Article |

    Cu2Se is of interest for thermoelectrics as it is environmentally sustainable and has a high figure of merit ZT; however, copper ion migration impacts device stability. Here a co-doping strategy that combines steric and electrostatic effects is shown to improve device stability as well as improving ZT to 3.

    • Haihua Hu
    • , Yiwei Ju
    •  & Jing-Feng Li

  • News & Views |

    The atomic reconstruction and stacking arrangement in twisted trilayer graphene with a range of varying twist angles are elucidated by four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy, revealing the hierarchical moiré of moiré superstructures that govern the structural symmetry at different length scales.

    • Ruichun Luo
    •  & Wu Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An orbitally ordered state in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x is revealed, which splits the energy levels of oxygen orbitals by ~50 meV.

    • Shuqiu Wang
    • , Niall Kennedy
    •  & Shane M. O’Mahony

  • Article |

    Controlling substrate elasticity during physical vapour deposition allows access to high-density stable glasses that would otherwise be formed under prohibitively slow deposition conditions on rigid substrates.

    • Peng Luo
    • , Sarah E. Wolf
    •  & Zahra Fakhraai

  • Article |

    Understanding mesoscale structure and dynamics in organic mixed ionic–electronic conductors is crucial. Mesoscale strain kinetics and structural hysteresis have been studied, and they uncover the coupling between charge carrier dynamics and mesoscale order in organic mixed ionic–electronic conductors.

    • Ruiheng Wu
    • , Dilara Meli
    •  & Christopher J. Takacs

  • Article |

    Optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) is an efficient mechanism for quantum sensors and has been discovered in a few systems, but all have technological limitations. Here the authors report room temperature ODMR in single defects in GaN, promising for integrated quantum sensing applications.

    • Jialun Luo
    • , Yifei Geng
    •  & Gregory D. Fuchs

  • Article |

    Precession phase of a magnetic material is shown to be recalled over timescales far exceeding that of Gilbert damping.

    • T. Makiuchi
    • , T. Hioki
    •  & E. Saitoh

  • News & Views |

    Electronic moiré patterns can be imprinted remotely onto a target quantum material, inducing exotic interacting behaviour.

    • Arpit Arora
    •  & Justin C. W. Song

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Intense light pulses can induce symmetry breaking, as for the generation of ferroelectricity in SrTiO3. Using ultrafast X-ray diffuse scattering at a free-electron laser, nonlinear phonon interactions that occur on such mid-IR excitation are observed, with a theory for the dynamics presented.

    • M. Fechner
    • , M. Först
    •  & A. Cavalleri

  • Article |

    Soft building blocks tend to be near spherical, limiting their packing structures to those found in metallic systems. Here the authors report the spontaneous generation of highly deformed mesoatoms using molecular pentagons and observe Frank–Kasper phases not found in metal alloys.

    • Xian-You Liu
    • , Xiao-Yun Yan
    •  & Stephen Z. D. Cheng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Samples of NdNiO2+x are prepared with meticulous control of the oxygen content. Their X-ray scattering and spectroscopy measurements then reveal that the previously reported charge density wave in undoped infinite-layer nickelates is, in fact, a spurious effect.

    • C. T. Parzyck
    • , N. K. Gupta
    •  & K. M. Shen

  • Article |

    Direct observation of noble gas structures has been achieved at room temperature using electron microscopy. This was enabled by trapping them between two layers of graphene, where they form two-dimensional clusters.

    • Manuel Längle
    • , Kenichiro Mizohata
    •  & Jani Kotakoski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors propose a non-Hermitian topological insulator with a real-valued energy spectrum based on a periodically driven Floquet model implemented in a photonic platform where generalized parity–time symmetry is protected against spontaneous symmetry breaking under a spatiotemporal gain and loss distribution.

    • Alexander Fritzsche
    • , Tobias Biesenthal
    •  & Alexander Szameit

  • Article |

    The local layer alignment in a wide range of trilayer graphene structures has been extracted by interferometric four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy, uncovering the complex picture of lattice reconstruction in twisted trilayers.

    • Isaac M. Craig
    • , Madeline Van Winkle
    •  & D. Kwabena Bediako

  • Letter |

    Multiferroics can possess multiple ferroic orders, for example, electric polarization and magnetism, and are of interest for new device applications. Here thermal control is shown to manipulate electric and magnetic orders in a single-phase quasi-two-dimensional halide perovskite.

    • Tong Zhu
    • , Xue-Zeng Lu
    •  & Hiroshi Kageyama

  • Article |

    The authors imprint a moiré potential on a remote monolayer semiconductor through the moiré potential created in a remote MoSe2/WS2 moiré bilayer. The imprinted moiré potential enables gate-controlled generation of flat bands and correlated insulating states in the targeted monolayer.

    • Jie Gu
    • , Jiacheng Zhu
    •  & Kin Fai Mak

  • Article |

    The authors combine laser excitation and scanning tunnelling spectroscopy to visualize the electron and hole distributions in photoexcited moiré excitons in twisted bilayer WS2. This photocurrent tunnelling microscopy approach enables the study of photoexcited non-equilibrium moiré phenomena at atomic scales.

    • Hongyuan Li
    • , Ziyu Xiang
    •  & Feng Wang

  • Letter |

    Plastic deformation requires the propagation of a kinked profile along dislocations. It is shown that each kink acts as a set of travelling thermal spikes, favouring the nucleation of supplementary kinks and long dislocation jumps that are observed experimentally.

    • Laurent Proville
    •  & Anshuman Choudhury

  • News & Views |

    Orthogonally twisted CrSBr ferromagnetic monolayers with in-plane Ising anisotropies are found to exhibit multistep magnetoresistance switching with a magnetic hysteresis opening. This work emphasizes the role of spin dimensionality in two-dimensional magnets, and the potential of orthogonal and large-twist-angle van der Waals magnets.

    • Lan Wang

  • News & Views |

    An all-electric switch of the persistent electron swirl in a quantum anomalous Hall state enables researchers to flip the electronic chirality of this quantum state.

    • Philip J. W. Moll

  • News & Views |

    By forming a heterostructure interface, and by judicious choice of crystallographic orientation, piezoelectrics are developed that show expansion or contraction along all axes on application of an electric field.

    • Eugene A. Eliseev
    •  & Anna N. Morozovska

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Piezoelectrics have longitudinal and transverse piezoelectric coefficients that are opposite in sign. Here, by tuning the interface inversion asymmetry in heterostructures, auxetic systems with positive longitudinal and transverse coefficients are realized, with expansion or contraction along all directions in an electric field.

    • Ming-Min Yang
    • , Tian-Yuan Zhu
    •  & Marin Alexe

  • News & Views |

    By inserting an epitaxial in-plane buffer layer of Bi5FeTi3O15, an artificial flux closure architecture enables ferroelectric polarization from a single unit cell of BaTiO3 or BiFeO3.

    • Neus Domingo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current physical neuromorphic computing faces critical challenges of how to reconfigure key physical dynamics of a system to adapt computational performance to match a diverse range of tasks. Here the authors present a task-adaptive approach to physical neuromorphic computing based on on-demand control of computing performance using various magnetic phases of chiral magnets.

    • Oscar Lee
    • , Tianyi Wei
    •  & Hidekazu Kurebayashi

  • News & Views |

    Chiral single-photon emitters are desirable, versatile tools for quantum information processing. Exploiting proximity to a strain-induced local magnetic field in the van der Waals antiferromagnet NiPS3 enables the emission of high-purity chiral single photons from monolayer WSe2 at zero external magnetic field.

    • Jing Tang
    •  & Xi Ling

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ferroelectric dead layers can form at perovskite interfaces—a major challenge in integrating oxide thin films into devices. Here, by depositing an in-plane-polarized epitaxial buffer layer of Bi5FeTi3O15, out-of-plane polarization is demonstrated in ultrathin films down to the single-unit-cell level.

    • Elzbieta Gradauskaite
    • , Quintin N. Meier
    •  & Morgan Trassin

  • Article |

    Trapped films of air known as plastrons are promising for underwater engineering but typically have short lifetimes. Here, aerophilic titanium alloy surfaces are developed with thermodynamically stabilized plastrons for antifouling applications.

    • Alexander B. Tesler
    • , Stefan Kolle
    •  & Wolfgang H. Goldmann

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