Materials science articles within Nature

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Many naturally occurring substances have a 'handedness' that enables them to interact highly specifically with matter or light. The helical features responsible for this can now be replicated in solid, porous films. See Letter p.422

    • Andreas Stein

  • Letter |

    Some beetle shells exhibit iridescence owing to the chiral organization of chitin making up the beetle's exoskeleton. Inspired by this, these authors fabricate thin glass films with helical pores introduced using a renewable cellulose template. The chiral structure allows the material, which can be free-standing, to selectively reflect light at a specific wavelength that can be tuned across the visible spectrum by altering the ratio of silica to cellulose during synthesis.

    • Kevin E. Shopsowitz
    • , Hao Qi
    •  & Mark J. MacLachlan

  • News & Views |

    An approach that entails printing compound-semiconductor ribbons on a silicon substrate offers the means to build nanoscale transistors that can be switched on and off much more effectively than their bulk analogues. See Letter page 286

    • John A. Rogers

  • Letter |

    The past few years have seen a spectacular growth of interest in graphene. Efforts to produce large sheets of monolayer (or few-layer) graphene could receive a welcome boost from the simple procedure reported by these authors. They show how baking various solid carbon sources (for example polymer films) deposited on a metal catalyst substrate can produce either pristine graphene or doped graphene in a single step.

    • Zhengzong Sun
    • , Zheng Yan
    •  & James M. Tour

  • Letter |

    A potential route to enhancing the performance of electronic devices is to integrate compound semiconductors, which have superior electronic properties, within silicon, which is cheap to process. These authors present a promising new concept to integrate ultrathin layers of single-crystal indium arsenide on silicon-based substrates with an epitaxial transfer method borrowed from large-area optoelectronics. With this technique, the authors fabricate thin-film transistors with excellent device performance.

    • Hyunhyub Ko
    • , Kuniharu Takei
    •  & Ali Javey

  • Letter |

    Holographic displays can produce truly three-dimensional (3D) images, but have so far been unable to update images fast enough. These authors have adapted a previous technique, based on holographic stereographic recording with a photorefractive polymeric material as the recording medium, to produce a quasi-real-time holographic display that can refresh its images every two seconds, and use it to demonstrate the possibility of 3D telepresence. Improvements could bring applications in telemedicine, prototyping, advertising, updatable 3D maps and entertainment.

    • P.-A. Blanche
    • , A. Bablumian
    •  & N. Peyghambarian

  • Letter |

    Isolated magnetic atoms doped into a semiconductor represent an interesting system for spintronics applications and a possible means of constructing quantum bits. So far, however, it has not been possible to study the correlation between the local atomic structure and the dopant's magnetic properties. Here, sensitive scanning probe techniques have been developed that allow the spin excitations of individual magnetic dopants within a two-dimensional semiconductor system to be measured.

    • Alexander A. Khajetoorians
    • , Bruno Chilian
    •  & Roland Wiesendanger

  • Letter |

    Single-molecule magnets are molecular complexes with magnetic bistability, and recently it was shown that such a magnetic memory effect is retained for Fe4 clusters when they are wired to a gold surface. These authors have tailored the clusters to have a preferential orientation and form a self-assembled monolayer on the surface. It then becomes possible to observe quantum tunnelling of the magnetization, which shows up as steps in the magnetic hysteresis loop.

    • M. Mannini
    • , F. Pineider
    •  & R. Sessoli

  • News & Views |

    The use of templates to control the morphology of nanostructures is a powerful but inflexible technique. A template that is remodelled during synthesis suggests fresh opportunities for fabricating new nanostructures.

    • Younan Xia
    •  & Byungkwon Lim

  • Letter |

    Electrophoresis is a motion of charged dispersed particles relative to a fluid in a uniform electric field. Here it is described how an anisotropic fluid — a nematic liquid crystal — can lead to motion of both charged and neutral particles, even when they are perfectly symmetrical, in any type of electric field. The phenomenon is caused by a distortion in the orientation of the liquid crystals around the particles. The approach could see applications in, for example, display technologies and colloidal assembly and disassembly.

    • Oleg D. Lavrentovich
    • , Israel Lazo
    •  & Oleg P. Pishnyak

  • News & Views |

    Interfaces can have quite different properties from those of their constituent materials. But it's surprising that the adsorption of a single organic molecule onto a magnetic surface can drastically modify that surface's magnetism.

    • Stefano Sanvito

  • Letter |

    Many fields would benefit from a simple and efficient method of trapping single particles, but this is extremely difficult when dealing with nanometre-sized objects in solution. These authors show that grooves and pockets etched into fluidic channels that acquire a charge on exposure act as highly effective electrostatic traps. With further optimization, this trapping concept could allow contact-free confinement of single proteins and nanoparticles, their sorting and fractionation, or assembly into high-density arrays.

    • Madhavi Krishnan
    • , Nassiredin Mojarad
    •  & Vahid Sandoghdar

  • Letter |

    These authors test whether patterns of seismicity and the stabilities of potentially relevant hydrous phases are consistent with a wet lithosphere. They show that there is nearly a one-to-one correlation between the dehydration of minerals and seismicity at depths less than ∼250 km, but no correlation at greater depths. They conclude that subducting slabs must be essentially dry by 400-km depth and thus do not provide a pathway for significant amounts of water to enter the mantle transition zone or the lower mantle.

    • Harry W. Green II
    • , Wang-Ping Chen
    •  & Michael R. Brudzinski

  • News |

    Successes at entangling three-circuit systems brighten the prospects for solid-state quantum computing.

    • Eugenie Samuel Reich

  • News & Views |

    The trend towards using ultracold atomic gases to explore emergent phenomena in many-body systems continues to gain momentum. This time around, they have been used to explore novel pairing mechanisms in one dimension. See Letter p.567

    • Immanuel Bloch

  • Letter |

    Quantum entanglement is a key resource for technologies such as quantum communication and computation. A major question for solid-state quantum information processing is whether an engineered system can display the three-qubit entanglement necessary for quantum error correction. A positive answer to this question is now provided. A circuit quantum electrodynamics device has been used to demonstrate deterministic production of three-qubit entangled states and the first step of basic quantum error correction.

    • L. DiCarlo
    • , M. D. Reed
    •  & R. J. Schoelkopf

  • Letter |

    What defines the boundary between the Earth's lithosphere and asthenosphere? Here it is shown experimentally that the instability of the hydrous mineral pargasite at depths greater than about 90 km causes a sharp drop in the water-storage capacity of a fertile upper-mantle mineralogy, and accordingly a sharp drop in its solidus temperate. This effect might define the lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary.

    • David H. Green
    • , William O. Hibberson
    •  & Anja Rosenthal

  • Letter |

    It was demonstrated recently that passing electrons through a spiral stack of graphite thin films generates an electron beam with orbital angular momentum — analogous to the spiralling wavefronts that can be introduced in photon beams and which have found widespread application. Here, a versatile holographic technique for generating these twisted electron beams is described. Moreover, a demonstration is provided of their potential use in probing a material's magnetic properties.

    • J. Verbeeck
    • , H. Tian
    •  & P. Schattschneider

  • Letter |

    In graphene, two particular sets of electrons exist that have a fourfold energy degeneracy. To study the corresponding four quantum states comprising a Landau level, these authors perform measurements on epitaxial graphene at 10 millikelvin. They take spectral 'fingerprints' of the Landau levels, showing in detail how they evolve with magnetic field and how they split into the four separate quantum states. They also observe states with Landau level filling factors of 7/2, 9/2 and 11/2.

    • Young Jae Song
    • , Alexander F. Otte
    •  & Joseph A. Stroscio

  • News & Views |

    Tiny holes have been drilled through individual layers of graphene — atomically thin sheets of carbon — using an electron beam. These nanopores might be useful for the ultrarapid sequencing of single DNA molecules.

    • Hagan Bayley

  • News |

    Doubts over the existence of the mysterious quantum phenomenon may soon be laid to rest.

    • Eugenie Samuel Reich

  • Letter |

    There is much interest in graphene for applications in ultrahigh-speed radio-frequency electronics, but conventional device fabrication processes lead to significant defects in graphene. Here a new way of fabricating high-speed graphene transistors is described. A nanowire with a metallic core and insulating shell is placed as the gate electrode on top of graphene, and source and drain electrodes are deposited through a self-alignment process, causing no appreciable damage to the graphene lattice.

    • Lei Liao
    • , Yung-Chen Lin
    •  & Xiangfeng Duan

  • News & Views |

    How many pairs of electrons and 'missing electrons' can sustain collective motion in a semiconductor? The limits of this electron–hole dance are found by probing the dance floor using ultrashort laser pulses.

    • Gregory D. Scholes

  • Letter |

    The superconducting phase of a superconductor is often one of several competing types of electronic order, including antiferromagnetism and charge density waves. For some superconductors, the superconducting transition temperature can be maximized by forcing the critical temperature of the competing order down to zero. Now, a related effect has been identified in a high-temperature superconductor, with the application of pressure yielding a striking two-step increase in the transition temperature.

    • Xiao-Jia Chen
    • , Viktor V. Struzhkin
    •  & Russell J. Hemley

  • Letter |

    Ferroelectric ferromagnets — materials that are both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic — are of significant technological interest. But they are rare, and those that do exist have weak ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties. Recently a new way of fabricating such materials was proposed, involving strain from the underlying substrate. This route has now been realized experimentally for EuTiO3. The work shows that a single experimental parameter, strain, can simultaneously control multiple order parameters.

    • June Hyuk Lee
    • , Lei Fang
    •  & Darrell G. Schlom

  • Letter |

    Graphene is highly electronically conducting across the plane of the material. These authors show that a graphene membrane separating two ionic solutions in electrical contact is strongly ionically insulating despite being atomically thin and has in-plane electronic properties dependent on the interfacial environment. Numerical modelling reveals that very high spatial resolution is possible using this system, and the researchers propose that drilled membranes could form the basis of DNA sequencing devices.

    • S. Garaj
    • , W. Hubbard
    •  & J. A. Golovchenko

  • Letter |

    For several years, researchers have aspired to record in situ images of a quantum fluid in which each underlying quantum particle is detected. This goal has now been achieved: here, fluorescence imaging is reported of strongly interacting bosonic Mott insulators in an optical lattice, with single-atom and single-site resolution. The approach opens up new avenues for the manipulation, analysis and applications of strongly interacting quantum gases on a lattice.

    • Jacob F. Sherson
    • , Christof Weitenberg
    •  & Stefan Kuhr

  • Letter |

    The oxygen interstitials in the layers separating the superconducting CuO2 planes undergo ordering phenomena in La2CuO4+y that enhance the transition temperature (Tc). It is also known that complex systems often have a scale-invariant structural organization, but hitherto none had been found in high-Tc materials. These authors report that the ordering of oxygen interstitials in the La2O2+y spacer layers of La2CuO4+y high-Tc superconductors is characterized by a fractal distribution up to a maximum limiting size of 400 µ.

    • Michela Fratini
    • , Nicola Poccia
    •  & Antonio Bianconi

  • Opinion |

    Telecommunications companies and oceanographers should work together to plug old and new submarine cables into research projects, says Yuzhu You. A global network could monitor climate change.

    • Yuzhu You

  • News |

    Independent researchers claim oxygen depletion in the Gulf of Mexico is real, but a US government report advises caution.

    • Amanda Mascarelli

  • Letter |

    The spontaneous assembly of two different types of nanoparticle into ordered superlattices offers a route to designing materials with precisely controlled properties, but available synthesis strategies have many practical limitations. These authors report a fabrication process which overcomes these limitations. They generate large-scale (square-millimetre) binary superlattice structures at a liquid–air interface, allowing the material to be free standing or transferred to any substrate ready for fabrication into useful devices.

    • Angang Dong
    • , Jun Chen
    •  & Christopher B. Murray

  • Letter |

    Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) have structure-dependent electronic properties that make them attractive for the fabrication of nanoscale electronic devices, but exploiting this potential has been hindered by the lack of precise production methods. Here the authors demonstrate how to reliably produce different GNRs, using precursor monomers that encode the structure of the targeted nanoribbon and are converted into GNRs by means of surface-assisted coupling.

    • Jinming Cai
    • , Pascal Ruffieux
    •  & Roman Fasel

  • Letter |

    Topological surface states are a class of electronic states that might be of interest in quantum computing or spintronic applications. They are predicted to be robust against imperfections, but so far there has been no evidence that these states do transmit through naturally occurring surface defects. Here, scanning tunnelling microscopy has been used to show that topological surface states of antimony can be transmitted through naturally occurring barriers that block non-topological surface states of common metals.

    • Jungpil Seo
    • , Pedram Roushan
    •  & Ali Yazdani

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    According to theory, electrons on the surface of a topological insulator are not allowed to make U-turns. This notion, and some of its main consequences, has now been tested experimentally.

    • Marcel Franz

  • News Feature |

    A new class of materials is poised to take condensed-matter physics by storm. Geoff Brumfiel looks at what is making topological insulators all the rage.

    • Geoff Brumfiel

  • Letter |

    Light–matter interactions in semiconductors hold great promise for numerous applications, but as device size is reduced such interactions typically weaken, potentially posing problems for applications at the nanoscale. Here the authors circumvent these limitations by producing colloidal particles with metallic cores and semiconducting shells, in which coupling of the plasmons in the metal to the excitons in the semiconductor is engineered to enhance light–matter interactions in the particle.

    • Jiatao Zhang
    • , Yun Tang
    •  & Min Ouyang

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Materials science across other nature.com journals