Electronic properties and materials articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Placing graphene on a boron nitride substrate and accurately aligning their crystallographic axes, to form a moiré superlattice, leads to profound changes in the graphene’s electronic spectrum.

    • L. A. Ponomarenko
    • , R. V. Gorbachev
    •  & A. K. Geim

  • Article |

    The formation of Ising quasiparticles in URu2Si2 results from ‘hastatic’ order, which breaks double time-reversal symmetry, mixing states of integer and half-integer spin, and accounts for the large entropy of condensation and the magnetic anomaly observed in torque magnetometry.

    • Premala Chandra
    • , Piers Coleman
    •  & Rebecca Flint

  • News & Views |

    A method has been developed to compute the precise quantum-mechanical properties of certain insulators. This approach avoids the uncertainties that are intrinsic to predictions made using existing approaches. See Article p.365

    • Paul R. C. Kent

  • Article |

    Recent developments that reduce the computational cost and scaling of wavefunction-based quantum-chemical techniques open the way to the successful application of such techniques to a variety of real-world solids.

    • George H. Booth
    • , Andreas Grüneis
    •  & Ali Alavi

  • Letter |

    Exposing a fused silica sample to a strong, waveform-controlled, few-cycle optical field increases the dielectric’s optical conductivity by more than 18 orders of magnitude in less than 1 femtosecond, allowing electric currents to be driven, directed and switched by the instantaneous light field.

    • Agustin Schiffrin
    • , Tim Paasch-Colberg
    •  & Ferenc Krausz

  • News & Views |

    The idea of using ultracold atoms to simulate the behaviour of electrons in new kinds of quantum systems — from topological insulators to exotic superfluids and superconductors — is a step closer to becoming a reality. See Letter p.83

    • Michael Chapman
    •  & Carlos Sá de Melo

  • News & Views |

    Stacking two oxide insulators together is known to yield a conducting system at the interface between the oxides. But the discovery that simply cleaving such an insulator yields the same outcome is unexpected. See Letter p.189

    • Elbio Dagotto

  • News Feature |

    Researchers have spent 25 years exploring the remarkable properties of fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphene. But commercializing them is neither quick nor easy.

    • Richard Van Noorden

  • Letter |

    The development of table-top femtosecond electron diffraction sources in recent years has opened up a new way to observe atomic motions in crystalline materials undergoing structural changes. Here, the technique is used to study the charge density wave material 1T-TaS2, where a modulation of the electron density is accompanied by a periodic lattice distortion. In this femtosecond electron diffraction experiment, where atomic motions are observed in response to a 140 femtosecond optical pulse, the periodic lattice distortion is found to collapse on an exceptionally fast timescale (about 250 femtoseconds), indicative of an electronically driven process involving a highly cooperative process.

    • Maximilian Eichberger
    • , Hanjo Schäfer
    •  & R. J. Dwayne Miller

  • Letter |

    In the high-transition-temperature superconductors, the pseudogap phase becomes predominant when the density of doped holes is reduced. In this phase it has been unclear which electronic symmetries (if any) are broken, what the identity of any associated order parameter might be, and which microscopic electronic degrees of freedom are active. Here, images of the intra-unit-cell states in underdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 + δ are studied, revealing electronic nematicity of the states close to the pseudogap energy.

    • M. J. Lawler
    • , K. Fujita
    •  & Eun-Ah Kim

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