Electronic properties and materials articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article |

    Nanowires show unique physical properties owing to their one-dimensional nature. Here Mocking and colleagues demonstrate that the length of nanowires is electronically stabilized such that the length distribution shows a preference for integer multiples of half of the electron Fermi wavelength.

    • Tijs F. Mocking
    • , Pantelis Bampoulis
    •  & Harold J. W. Zandvliet

  • Article |

    Exploiting the optics-like dynamics of low-energy electronic excitations in graphene requires the challenging combination of ballistic transport and complex gating. Here the fabrication and characterization of suspended graphene p–njunctions is reported, paving the way for future electron optics experiments.

    • Peter Rickhaus
    • , Romain Maurand
    •  & Christian Schönenberger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The incorporation of electronic circuits into various plastic products and devices is limited by the brittle nature of silicon wafers. Here, Sun et al.demonstrate flexible and high-performance all-carbon-based transistor circuits that can be thermo-moulded into various shapes.

    • Dong-Ming Sun
    • , Marina Y. Timmermans
    •  & Yutaka Ohno

  • Article |

    Bismuth selenide has emerged as a model topological insulator system, but in the actual material surface-state band bending introduces complications. Here, the authors use defects as sensors in scanning tunnelling measurements to investigate the band bending and achieve its reduction by copper doping.

    • Chris Mann
    • , Damien West
    •  & Chih-Kang Shih

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although organic transistors have many advantages, they are not typically known for their high performance. Khodagholy et al. report the fabrication of organic electrochemical transistors that combine high transconductance with mechanical flexibility, and are attractive for biosensor applications.

    • Dion Khodagholy
    • , Jonathan Rivnay
    •  & George G. Malliaras

  • Article |

    The Casimir effect is based on quantum electrodynamical effects between two electrically neutral objects in close proximity. Here Zou et al. observe the Casimir effect between two silicon components on a single micromechanical chip, allowing for an on-chip exploitation of the Casimir force.

    • J. Zou
    • , Z. Marcet
    •  & H. B. Chan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although LaAlO3 and SrTiO3 are both insulators, when they are brought together at a (100) interface, a highly conducting two-dimensional electron gas forms between them. Annandi et al.show that this also happens at a (110) interface, counter to expectations that it should not.

    • A. Annadi
    • , Q. Zhang
    •  & Ariando

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although ferroelectrics are generally insulating, their domain walls can show electrical conductivity. Here Sluka et al. observe a highly conducting free-electron gas at charged domain walls in ferroelectric BaTiO3.

    • Tomas Sluka
    • , Alexander K. Tagantsev
    •  & Nava Setter

  • Article |

    The high-speed, large-area printing of aligned semiconducting nanowires is vital for practical device applications. Here, the authors use a high-speed printing technique to print semiconducting nanowire arrays onto device substrates with precise nanowire control, and high field-effect mobilities are observed.

    • Sung-Yong Min
    • , Tae-Sik Kim
    •  & Tae-Woo Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When physicists study the characteristics of quantum conductors they usually take great pains to limit the resistance of other elements in the system. But Jezouin et al. show that when a single quantum channel is measured in series with a resistor, it exhibits analogous characteristics to a Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid.

    • S. Jezouin
    • , M. Albert
    •  & F. Pierre

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conductive polymers are of great interest for electronic applications, but their disorder has made it difficult to realize their full electronic potential. Here transport measurements uncover the intrinsic transport properties of metal-organic polymer nanoribbons.

    • Cristina Hermosa
    • , Jose Vicente Álvarez
    •  & Félix Zamora

  • Article |

    Dielectric breakdown in Mott insulators induced by strong electric fields is thought to take place via a Zener mechanism. Guiot et al. show that the breakdown characteristics are instead similar to the avalanche breakdown in conventional semiconductors, although with much longer delay times.

    • V. Guiot
    • , L. Cario
    •  & D. Roditchev

  • Article |

    When a topological insulator is coupled with a superconductor, supercurrents arise that—if fully understood—may allow the detection of long-sought Majorana fermions. Here the nature of these supercurrents is further elucidated as they are characterized as non-symmetric and carried by surface states.

    • Sungjae Cho
    • , Brian Dellabetta
    •  & Nadya Mason

  • Article |

    Piezoelectronic materials are attractive for force sensing and as energy harvesting components in electronics that interface directly with the human body. Here, the authors synthesize large area, flexible, electrospun materials capable of ultra-high sensitivity force measurements in the low-pressure regime.

    • Luana Persano
    • , Canan Dagdeviren
    •  & John A. Rogers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transistors that operate by the passage of electrons through a single-dopant atom achieve the ultimate limit for the miniaturization of electronic devices, but only when multiple transistors are intimately connected can they become useful. Roche et al. demonstrate the equivalent of just this, connecting two such transistors to build a two-atom electron pump.

    • B. Roche
    • , R.-P. Riwar
    •  & X. Jehl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flexible organic electronic devices have the potential to serve as biosensors in living animals. Khodagholy et al. show that organic transistors can be used to record brain activity in rats and demonstrate that they have a superior signal-to-noise ratio compared with electrodes due to local signal amplification.

    • Dion Khodagholy
    • , Thomas Doublet
    •  & George G. Malliaras

  • Article |

    Silicene is a silicon-based analogue of graphene, but with subtle and potentially useful differences. Wei-Feng Tsai and colleagues show that these differences could be exploited to build electrically-gated silicene devices that generate and control spin-polarized currents with near perfect efficiency.

    • Wei-Feng Tsai
    • , Cheng-Yi Huang
    •  & A. Bansil

  • Article |

    Topological insulators are bulk insulators with conductive boundary states, and until now have been based only on inorganic materials. Wang et al.use first-principles calculations to predict a class of organic topological insulators based on organometallic lattices exhibiting robust topological edge states.

    • Z.F Wang
    • , Zheng Liu
    •  & Feng Liu

  • Article |

    Understanding high temperature superconductivity in the cuprates is one of the hardest problems in physics to date. Wang et al.use state-of-the-art scanning tunnelling spectroscopy to visualize the atomic-scale electronic structure of the Mott insulator phase from which this elusive state emerges.

    • Cun Ye
    • , Peng Cai
    •  & Yayu Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In metals, plasmon properties are fixed once the structure is built, but in graphene they can be altered by electric or magnetic fields. Using electrical time-of-flight measurements, Kumada et al. show wide plasmon velocity tunability in graphene with a varying magnetic field.

    • N. Kumada
    • , S. Tanabe
    •  & T. Fujisawa

  • Article |

    Organic electronic materials are promising candidates for applications in which flexible electronic devices are required. Yiet al. demonstrate a high-performance, flexible organic transistor based on solution-processed small molecules that can be fabricated with a simple, low-cost process.

    • Hee Taek Yi
    • , Marcia M. Payne
    •  & Vitaly Podzorov

  • Article |

    The charge-transfer characteristics of conjugated molecules are important in determining their electronic properties. Using resonant photoemission spectroscopy, Batraet al. quantify the through-space charge transfer in two model conjugated systems with femtosecond resolution.

    • Arunabh Batra
    • , Gregor Kladnik
    •  & Latha Venkataraman

  • Article |

    Topologically protected states of matter are receiving widespread attention owing to their unusual electronic properties. Using numerical simulations, this study predicts that tin telluride is a physical realization of a new class of materials termed topological crystalline insulators.

    • Timothy H. Hsieh
    • , Hsin Lin
    •  & Liang Fu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The realization of wafer-scale graphene electronics is envisaged to open up the route to the use of graphene in mainstream electronics. Hertelet al.take a step in this direction by fabricating a transistor with a SiC channel and graphene electrodes, with excellent performance up to megahertz frequencies.

    • S. Hertel
    • , D. Waldmann
    •  & H.B. Weber

  • Article |

    Vortex–charge duality is a model that has been proposed for describing the superconducting to insulator transition in disordered thin films. Mehtaet al. report experimental evidence for this duality in the two-dimensional electron gas that arises in LaAlO3/SrTiO3heterostructures.

    • M.M. Mehta
    • , D.A. Dikin
    •  & V. Chandrasekhar

  • Article |

    The SrTiO3/LaAlO3 system is widely studied because it forms a two-dimensional electron gas at the interface. This study investigates the effects of diluting the LaAlO3 layer with SrTiO3, and finds that the threshold thickness required for the onset of conductivity scales inversely with the fraction of LaAlO3, suggesting an intrinsic origin for the electron gas.

    • M.L. Reinle-Schmitt
    • , C. Cancellieri
    •  & P.R. Willmott

  • Article |

    Stretchable electronics based on conducting polymers offer new opportunities for designing flexible technologies. Parket al. build three-dimensional nanostructures from elastomers soaked with liquid metal to produce stretchable conductors with greatly improved strain properties over solid films.

    • Junyong Park
    • , Shuodao Wang
    •  & Seokwoo Jeon

  • Article |

    Spin ice is a state of matter that occurs in certain rare earth magnets with a pyrochlore structure. Here it is shown theoretically that, in conjunction with the magnetic monopoles observed in previous experiments, spin ice can also host electric dipoles.

    • D.I. Khomskii

  • Article |

    Devices made up of nanowires offer promise for a range of electronic, photonic and energy applications. Liuet al. fabricate a miniature capacitor by employing a thin layer of Cu2O as a separator between layers of carbon and copper.

    • Zheng Liu
    • , Yongjie Zhan
    •  & Pulickel M. Ajayan

  • Article |

    Transistors based on ions, as opposed to electrons, offer the promise of bridging the gap between technological and biological systems. Tybrandtet al. present logic gates based on ion bipolar junction transistors that operate at concentrations compatible with biological systems.

    • Klas Tybrandt
    • , Robert Forchheimer
    •  & Magnus Berggren

  • Article |

    Strain engineering has been proposed as a promising strategy for manipulating the electronic properties of graphene. This scanning tunnelling microscopy study demonstrates the feasibility of controlling strain patterns in graphene down to the nanoscale.

    • Jiong Lu
    • , A.H. Castro Neto
    •  & Kian Ping Loh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electronic and optoelectronic devices based on gallium nitride suffer from self-heating arising as a result of their operation. This study presents and demonstrates a strategy for managing this problem that relies on graphene quilts which dissipate the heat away.

    • Zhong Yan
    • , Guanxiong Liu
    •  & Alexander A. Balandin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Point defects in diamond in the form of nitrogen vacancy centres are believed to be promising candidates for qubits in quantum computers. Grotzet al. present a method for manipulating the charge state of nitrogen vacancies using an electrolytic gate electrode.

    • Bernhard Grotz
    • , Moritz V. Hauf
    •  & Jose A. Garrido

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Field-effect transistors fabricated from carbon nanotubes have been investigated extensively over the past two decades. This study demonstrates a nanotube-based integrated circuit design that substantially improves the speed and power consumption with respect to silicon-based integrated circuits.

    • Li Ding
    • , Zhiyong Zhang
    •  & Lian-Mao Peng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Graphene's broad bandwidth makes it promising as a photodetector, but common electronics cannot analyse the currents at high frequencies. Here, using photocurrent measurements, laser-induced carrier generation effects in freely suspended graphene and at graphene–metal interfaces are clarified up to 1 THz.

    • Leonhard Prechtel
    • , Li Song
    •  & Alexander W. Holleitner

  • Article |

    The surface electronic structure of topological insulators is characterized by a so-called Dirac cone energy dispersion. This study shows that by tuning the compositions in the compound Bi2−xSbxTe3−ySeyone can control the precise features of its Dirac cone structure while keeping it a bulk insulator.

    • T. Arakane
    • , T. Sato
    •  & Yoichi Ando

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fluctuations of the electrical current in nanoscale devices reveal important details of the physical processes occurring inside them. Using a quantum point contact placed in its vicinity, Ubbelohde et al. measure the electrical fluctuations in a single-electron transistor, and determine the dynamical features of the transport.

    • Niels Ubbelohde
    • , Christian Fricke
    •  & Rolf J. Haug

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