Materials for devices articles within Nature Materials

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  • Comment |

    Automated experiments can accelerate research and development. ‘Flexible automation’ enables the cost- and time-effective design, construction and reconfiguration of automated experiments. Flexible automation is empowering researchers to deploy new science and technology faster than ever before.

    • Benjamin P. MacLeod
    • , Fraser G. L. Parlane
    •  & Curtis P. Berlinguette

  • Editorial |

    Innovations in soft materials design and engineering are delivering promising functional components for advanced soft robotic applications.

  • News & Views |

    The giant magnetoelastic effect measured in magnetic elastomers enables new energy generators for wearable and implantable electronics.

    • Denys Makarov

  • News & Views |

    An interplay between deswelling and buckling in a polymer gel is harnessed to achieve sequential snap events for repeatable jumping motion, opening the door to autonomously moving soft robots.

    • Johannes T. B. Overvelde

  • Comment |

    New classes of functional soft materials show promise to revolutionize robotics. Now materials scientists must focus on realizing the predicted performance of these materials and developing effective and robust interfaces to integrate them into highly functional robotic systems that have a positive impact on human life.

    • Philipp Rothemund
    • , Yoonho Kim
    •  & Christoph Keplinger

  • News & Views |

    A functional bioadhesive has been developed to possess properties such as mechanical compliance, electrical conductivity and optical transparency, and is utilized for bonding electronic devices to various organs in the body for up to several months.

    • Tsuyoshi Sekitani

  • Review Article |

    Thermoelectric materials can generate energy from a heat differential. This Review provides an overview of mid- to high-temperature thermoelectrics, their application in modules, and the issues that need to be addressed to enable commercial implementation of state-of-the-art materials.

    • Qingyu Yan
    •  & Mercouri G. Kanatzidis

  • News & Views |

    A seemingly disordered network of nanowires governed by thermodynamics is used as the physical ‘reservoir’ in a memristive implementation of reservoir computing to process spatiotemporal information.

    • Qiangfei Xia
    • , J. Joshua Yang
    •  & Rivu Midya

  • Review Article |

    This Review provides an outlook on current understanding of the role of strain on the performance and stability of perovskite solar cells, as well as on tools to characterize strain in halide perovskite films and on strain management strategies.

    • Dongtao Liu
    • , Deying Luo
    •  & Wei Zhang

  • Article |

    A two-dimensional hole gas with high carrier density is confined at the interface between a solution-processed, single-crystalline organic semiconducting film and the electric double layer formed by an ion gel on top of the film.

    • Naotaka Kasuya
    • , Junto Tsurumi
    •  & Jun Takeya

  • News & Views |

    Passivation of traps via site-specific surface doping allows access to the intrinsic properties of organic semiconductors and leads to the observation of electron atmospheres in organic crystals.

    • Oana D. Jurchescu

  • News & Views |

    A substantial spin–orbit interaction is introduced in a purely silicon heterostructure and can be tuned through an applied gate voltage.

    • Christopher H. Marrows

  • Article |

    A functional interfacial material has been developed for soft integration of bioelectronic devices with biological tissues. This has been applied in battery-free optoelectronic systems for deep-brain optogenetics and subdermal phototherapy as well as wireless millimetre-scale pacemakers and flexible multielectrode epicardial arrays.

    • Quansan Yang
    • , Tong Wei
    •  & John A. Rogers

  • News & Views |

    Four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy is demonstrated to be a powerful technique for interrogating local strain of twisted graphene bilayers, revealing a two-regime lattice reconstruction process below the ‘magic’ angle.

    • S. J. Haigh
    •  & R. Gorbachev

  • Review Article |

    Metal-halide and oxide perovskites are a rich playground for fundamental studies and applications. This Review focuses on the opportunities opened by reducing the dimensionality of these materials to two-dimensional monolayers.

    • Antonio Gaetano Ricciardulli
    • , Sheng Yang
    •  & Michael Saliba

  • Article |

    Stacked elastomeric arrays containing plasmonic nanoparticles show efficient chiral responses that can be fully controlled by mechanical compression and stack rotation. These simple layered materials may be useful modulators for photonic applications.

    • Patrick T. Probst
    • , Martin Mayer
    •  & Andreas Fery

  • Article |

    Adducts of dimethyl sulfoxide and hydrobromic acid demonstrate efficient p-doping of various organic semiconductors and compatibility with other counterions used to improve stability and other performance parameters of organic-based optoelectronic devices.

    • Nobuya Sakai
    • , Ross Warren
    •  & Henry J. Snaith

  • Article |

    Porous materials can absorb energy by water infiltration, but studies at industrially relevant high-rate intrusions are rare. Here, high-rate experiments are performed on ZIFs showing high energy storage capacity, while molecular simulations allow design rules to be formulated for absorption materials.

    • Yueting Sun
    • , Sven M. J. Rogge
    •  & Jin-Chong Tan

  • Article |

    A general method for the synthesis of high-purity crystals of metastable 1T′-phase transition metal dichalcogenides is reported, providing a source of phase-engineered materials that can be used to systematically explore their intrinsic properties.

    • Zhuangchai Lai
    • , Qiyuan He
    •  & Hua Zhang

  • News & Views |

    Liquid-metal networks have been developed that can be stretched to extreme deformations with minimal change in electrical resistance, ushering in approaches for breathable and integrated soft and stretchable electronic devices.

    • Michael D. Bartlett

  • Article |

    Conductors made of a mixture of liquid and solid domains of Ga–In alloy can be stretched over 1,000%, keeping almost constant conductivity, and used to connect commercial electronic components and realize stretchable multilayer printed circuit boards.

    • Shanliangzi Liu
    • , Dylan S. Shah
    •  & Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio

  • Article |

    Upon light stimulation, two jointed liquid crystalline network oscillators affect the movement of each other, achieving synchronized in-phase and anti-phase oscillations that can be explored to generate soft actuators with collective responses.

    • Ghislaine Vantomme
    • , Lars C. M. Elands
    •  & Dirk J. Broer

  • News & Views |

    Large reversible shear strain has been achieved by electric-field-driven bipolar switching in a hybrid ferroelectric, facilitating development of shape-memory-type actuators with outstanding figures of merit.

    • Sarah Guerin
    •  & Damien Thompson

  • Perspective |

    Thermoelectric materials can generate electricity from waste heat but can also use electricity for cooling. This Perspective discusses coefficients of performance for these systems and the state-of-the-art for materials, and suggests strategies for the discovery of improved thermoelectric materials.

    • Jun Mao
    • , Gang Chen
    •  & Zhifeng Ren

  • Article |

    Phosphonated polymers have been proposed as anhydrous proton conductors for fuel cells but anhydride formation of phosphonic acid functional groups lowers conductivity. A synergistically integrated phosphonated poly(pentafluorostyrene) is shown to maintain high protonic conductivity above 200 °C.

    • Vladimir Atanasov
    • , Albert S. Lee
    •  & Yu Seung Kim

  • Perspective |

    Although low-temperature water electrolysers are crucial for decarbonizing the industrial sector, substantial improvements in performance and deployment rates are needed. Recent developments in devices with modified architectures and designs, and practical challenges hampering large-scale deployment are discussed.

    • Marie Francine Lagadec
    •  & Alexis Grimaud

  • Article |

    A graphene nanocomposite hydrogel showing anisotropic swelling is used to realize an electrically conducting and removable bioadhesive that improves the mechanical and electrical integration of bioelectronics devices with wet dynamic tissues.

    • Jue Deng
    • , Hyunwoo Yuk
    •  & Xuanhe Zhao

  • News & Views |

    Polymeric glasses with significant thermodynamic and kinetic stability have been fabricated using physical vapour deposition, providing a mean to gather insight into the properties of glasses aged for millions of years.

    • Juan J. de Pablo

  • News & Views |

    Controlling the handedness of magnetic excitations in magnetic materials is crucial for magnonic applications. Ferrimagnets provide a promising route.

    • Satoshi Okamoto

  • News & Views |

    A crystallographic brick wall design for polycrystalline dielectric ceramics now allows the application of high electric fields at minimal misfit strain, yielding supreme reliability and high energy density.

    • Jürgen Rödel

  • Article |

    Protein-based materials for soft robotics that self-heal within a second while maintaining the high strength of the damaged area are reported.

    • Abdon Pena-Francesch
    • , Huihun Jung
    •  & Metin Sitti

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