Outlook |
Featured
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Research Highlights |
A new way to 3D shapes
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Outlook |
Bioelectronics: The bionic material
Graphene could make an ideal basis for a medical repair kit.
- Charles Schmidt
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Outlook |
Electronics: Back to analogue
Trying to shoehorn graphene into a digital circuit isn't working. But there may be another potential path to glory.
- Katherine Bourzac
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Outlook |
Q&A: Taking charge
Nature Outlook talks to the first director of the MIT's Centre for Graphene Devices and Systems, which was created in July 2011 to foster collaboration among academic, industrial and government groups studying this form of carbon.
- Tomás Palacios
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Outlook |
Production: Beyond sticky tape
Flecks of graphene are easy to make. But producing sheets of pristine, electronics-quality material is another matter.
- Richard Van Noorden
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News & Views |
A duo of graphene mimics
The synthesis of analogues of graphene by two different means provides insight into the origins of massless particles and paves the way for studies of materials with exotic topological properties. See Letters p.302 & p.306
- Jonathan Simon
- & Markus Greiner
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Letter |
Creating, moving and merging Dirac points with a Fermi gas in a tunable honeycomb lattice
A tunable optical lattice is used to engineer massless and massive Dirac fermions and realize the topological transition at which two Dirac points merge and annihilate each other.
- Leticia Tarruell
- , Daniel Greif
- & Tilman Esslinger
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Letter |
Designer Dirac fermions and topological phases in molecular graphene
The formation of massless Dirac fermions is demonstrated in a highly tunable molecular graphene lattice, and particular distortions of the lattice are shown to endow the fermions with mass or engage the fermions with artificial electric and magnetic fields.
- Kenjiro K. Gomes
- , Warren Mar
- & Hari C. Manoharan
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Research Highlights |
Competition looms for graphene
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News & Views |
Continuity through dispersity
By making polymers whose central blocks have a range of lengths, materials have been prepared that contain separate, intermeshed domains extending throughout the material — a highly desirable structure.
- Richard A Register
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Letter |
Field-driven photoemission from nanostructures quenches the quiver motion
Experiments using ultrafast mid-infrared light pulses on nanostructures access a new regime in photoelectron emission, revealing classical sub-cycle electron dynamics in optical near-fields and breaking a diffraction limit in strong-field physics.
- G. Herink
- , D. R. Solli
- & C. Ropers
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News |
A solid case for Majorana fermions
First compelling evidence of self-annihilating entities in a semiconductor is a step forward for quantum computing.
- Eugenie Samuel Reich
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News |
Optical memory could ease Internet bottlenecks
Latest design uses less power and retains data longer.
- Katherine Bourzac
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News & Views |
Cell environments programmed with light
A combination of two light-induced reactions has been used to attach peptides to a polymeric gel, and then to detach them from it. This feat opens up opportunities for studying the effects of signalling molecules on cell behaviour in vitro.
- Matthias P. Lutolf
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Letter |
Re-emerging superconductivity at 48 kelvin in iron chalcogenides
Unexpectedly, in superconducting iron chalcogenides, a second, much higher, maximum in the superconducting transition temperature emerges under increasing pressure.
- Liling Sun
- , Xiao-Jia Chen
- & Zhongxian Zhao
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Research Highlights |
Nanoscale shells trap light
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Research Highlights |
Six-faced particles
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Research Highlights |
Printing tiny coiled antennas
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Letter |
Thresholdless nanoscale coaxial lasers
A new family of resonators for nanoscale lasers is described that allows the size of the laser cavity to be scaled down without increasing the threshold power required to drive lasing.
- M. Khajavikhan
- , A. Simic
- & Y. Fainman
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News & Views |
Crystal cuts on the nanoscale
A simple method has been developed to control the shape of nanoscale cuprous oxide crystals. Some shapes turn out to be much better than others as catalysts for a light-activated reaction.
- Peidong Yang
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Letter |
Nonlinear material behaviour of spider silk yields robust webs
Spider web deformation simulations, theory and experiments reveal how the nonlinear response of spider silk to strain and the discrete geometry of a web contribute to its robustness, integrity and performance.
- Steven W. Cranford
- , Anna Tarakanova
- & Markus J. Buehler
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Research Highlights |
Circuit, heal thyself
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News & Views |
Shape matters
The ligand-mediated binding of colloid particles to each other is more effective if the particles are flat rather than curved. This finding opens up opportunities for the design of self-assembling materials.
- Sharon C. Glotzer
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Research Highlights |
Magnetic switch for memory
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Letter |
Coherent singlet-triplet oscillations in a silicon-based double quantum dot
Exploiting the weak interactions between electron spins and nuclear spins in silicon-based quantum dots leads to a dephasing time two orders of magnitude greater than in analogous gallium-arsenide-based devices, demonstrating the potential of silicon as a host material for quantum information processing.
- B. M. Maune
- , M. G. Borselli
- & A. T. Hunter
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News |
Engineering slimmer solar cells
A recipe to increase a thin film’s appetite for light.
- Kate McAlpine
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Letter |
Modelling the rheology of MgO under Earth’s mantle pressure, temperature and strain rates
Numerical modelling of the rheology of MgO at the pressure, temperature and strain rates of Earth's mantle shows that extremely low strain rates counteract the influence of pressure, so that MgO is generally a very weak phase in the mantle.
- Patrick Cordier
- , Jonathan Amodeo
- & Philippe Carrez
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News & Views |
A fresh twist for self-assembly
Molecular helicity affects many of the bulk properties of materials. A study finds that helicity also controls the self-assembly of colloidal particles, opening the door to a new generation of functional materials. See Letter p.348
- Volker Schaller
- & Andreas R. Bausch
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Letter |
Reconfigurable self-assembly through chiral control of interfacial tension
Molecular chirality can be used to control interfacial tension in multi-component mixtures of chiral molecules, and tuning the chirality makes it possible to produce and manipulate self-assembling complex chiral structures.
- Thomas Gibaud
- , Edward Barry
- & Zvonimir Dogic
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News & Views |
A fresh twist on shrinking materials
Unusual lattice vibrations have been discovered in scandium trifluoride — a simple compound that shrinks when heated. This finding may help to explain the phenomenon of negative thermal expansion.
- J. Paul Attfield
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Letter |
Tuning charge transport in solution-sheared organic semiconductors using lattice strain
A solution-processing method known as solution shearing is used to introduce lattice strain to organic semiconductors, thus improving charge carrier mobility.
- Gaurav Giri
- , Eric Verploegen
- & Zhenan Bao
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Research Highlights |
Recharge through the skin
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News & Views |
Marginal matters
Most soft materials, such as sand, can be in either a solid-like or a liquid-like state. New experiments probe the surprisingly rich nonlinear physics that can occur in between these two states. See Letter p.355
- Vincenzo Vitelli
- & Martin van Hecke
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News & Views |
Molecular wires get connected
A long-standing issue in nanotechnology is how to connect molecular electronic devices. A method for splicing nanoscale wires made from different materials paves the way for a solution to this problem.
- Dario M. Bassani
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Letter |
Jamming by shear
Within the previous framework of jamming, granular systems were expected to jam only above a critical density, but here it is shown that application of shear to frictional grains can lead to a rich set of anisotropic jammed states at densities below this critical value.
- Dapeng Bi
- , Jie Zhang
- & R. P. Behringer
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Review Article |
Assembly of hybrid photonic architectures from nanophotonic constituents
- Oliver Benson
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News & Views |
A sense for touch
Will a sense of touch similar to that of humans ever be developed in robots? Results on the physics of friction for fingerprint-like ridges sliding across textured surfaces may lead the way to tactile robotic sensors.
- C. Mathew Mate
- & Robert W. Carpick
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News |
Graphene spun into metre-long fibres
A liquid crystal starting phase is key to drawing macro-scale threads from these nano-scale flakes.
- James Mitchell Crow
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News & Views Forum |
Perfect lenses in focus
Materials that refract light backwards are thought to be required for making super-resolution lenses. An alternative proposal — that conventional, positively refracting media can do the job — has met with controversy. Two experts from either side of the debate lay out their views on the matter.
- Tomáš Tyc
- & Xiang Zhang
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Brief Communications Arising |
Fundamental limits of ‘ankylography’ due to dimensional deficiency
- Haiqing Wei
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Letter |
Frictional ageing from interfacial bonding and the origins of rate and state friction
- Qunyang Li
- , Terry E. Tullis
- & Robert W. Carpick
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Research Highlights |
Towers grow by drips and drops
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Research Highlights |
Light, springy mesh
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Feature |
Electronics: Organic growth
The multifaceted field of carbon-based electronics offers options for researchers from all areas of the physical sciences.
- Neil Savage
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Letter |
Structural transformation in supercooled water controls the crystallization rate of ice
- Emily B. Moore
- & Valeria Molinero
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Research Highlights |
Getting past a brain block
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Review Article |
Multigate transistors as the future of classical metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors
- Isabelle Ferain
- , Cynthia A. Colinge
- & Jean-Pierre Colinge