Materials science articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    Although compound semiconductors like gallium arsenide (GaAs) offer advantages over silicon for photovoltaic and optoelectronic applications, these do not outweigh the costly process of growing large layers of these materials and transferring them to appropriate substrates. However, a new fabrication approach is now demonstrated: films of GaAs and AlGaAs are grown in thick, multilayered assemblies in a single sequence; the individual layers are then released and distributed over foreign substrates by printing.

    • Jongseung Yoon
    • , Sungjin Jo
    •  & John A. Rogers

  • Letter |

    Superconductivity and magnetic order are well known in C60 compounds of the form A3C60 (where A = alkali metal). The spherical C60 molecular ions in these crystals are almost always arranged in a face-centred cubic (f.c.c.) packing, except in Cs3C60, where the known superconducting phase has a body-centred cubic (b.c.c) packing. Now the f.c.c. polymorph for Cs3C60 has been isolated; it too is superconducting, although its magnetic properties are very different to those of its b.c.c counterpart.

    • Alexey Y. Ganin
    • , Yasuhiro Takabayashi
    •  & Kosmas Prassides

  • Letter |

    Spider silk proteins are remarkably soluble when stored at high concentration and yet can be converted to extremely sturdy fibres, through unknown molecular mechanisms. Here, the X-ray structure of the amino-terminal domain of a silk protein is presented, revealing how evolutionarily conserved polar surfaces might control self-assembly as the pH is lowered along the spider's silk extrusion duct. Such a mechanism might be applicable to the design of versatile fibrous materials.

    • Glareh Askarieh
    • , My Hedhammar
    •  & Stefan D. Knight

  • News & Views |

    For many potential applications, carbon nanotubes must be chemically modified, but the reactions involved aren't easily controlled. The discovery of a reversible modification process is a step towards such control.

    • Maurizio Prato

  • Letter |

    Here, artificial proteins are described that mimic the molecular architecture of titin — a protein that helps to govern the passive elastic properties of muscle. The new artificial proteins combine structured and unstructured domains, and can be photochemically crosslinked into a solid biomaterial that is resilient at low strains and extensible and tough at high strains. This provides an example of tailoring the macroscopic properties of a material through engineering at the single-molecule level.

    • Shanshan Lv
    • , Daniel M. Dudek
    •  & Hongbin Li

  • News Feature |

    Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, largely forgotten as attention turned to biofuels and batteries, are staging a comeback. Jeff Tollefson investigates.

    • Jeff Tollefson

  • Letter |

    Supercooling is a phenomenon by which a liquid remains in its fluid phase well below its melting point. Supercooling can be inhibited by the presence of a solid surface, whereby crystalline surfaces cause adjacent atoms in the liquid to become ordered, inducing crystal nucleation of the melt. Here it is shown that a particular surface ordering of gold atoms on top of a silicon substrate can stabilize the liquid phase of a gold-silicon eutectic droplet, and thus enhance supercooling.

    • T. U. Schülli
    • , R. Daudin
    •  & A. Pasturel

  • News & Views |

    Droplets of a liquid alloy on a silicon surface can rearrange the surface atoms so that they mimic the short-range ordering of atoms in the alloy. Remarkably, this effect inhibits freezing of the droplets.

    • A. Lindsay Greer

  • Letter |

    The strength of conventional metals is determined by the interaction of dislocations with obstacles such as grain boundaries. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that the strength of ultrafine-grained copper containing twin boundaries can be controlled by a dislocation nucleation mechanism activated below a critical twin thickness. Below this thickness the material becomes softer. The smaller the grains, the smaller the critical twin boundary spacing, and the higher the metal's maximum strength.

    • Xiaoyan Li
    • , Yujie Wei
    •  & Huajian Gao

  • News & Views |

    Microfluidic devices have many applications in chemistry and biology, but practical hitches associated with their use are often overlooked. One such device that optimizes catalysts tackles these issues head-on.

    • Robert C. R. Wootton
    •  & Andrew J. deMello

  • News & Views |

    Bose–Einstein condensates are ideal tools with which exotic phenomena can be investigated. The hitherto-unrealized Dicke quantum phase transition has now been observed with one such system in an optical cavity.

    • Cheng Chin
    •  & Nathan Gemelke

  • Letter |

    Atom chips provide a versatile quantum laboratory for experiments with ultracold atomic gases, but techniques to control atomic interactions and to generate entanglement have been unavailable so far. Here, the experimental generation of multi-particle entanglement on an atom chip is described. The technique is used to produce spin-squeezed states of a two-component Bose–Einstein condensate, which should be useful for quantum metrology.

    • Max F. Riedel
    • , Pascal Böhi
    •  & Philipp Treutlein

  • News & Views |

    Colloid particles that form bonds to each other at specific orientations might self-assemble into all sorts of useful materials. The key — and the lock — to such binding has been discovered.

    • Michael J. Solomon

  • Letter |

    An insulator does not conduct electricity, and so cannot in general be used to transmit an electrical signal. But an insulator's electrons possess spin in addition to charge, and so can transmit a signal in the form of a spin wave. Here a hybrid metal–insulator–metal structure is reported, in which an electrical signal in one metal layer is directly converted to a spin wave in the insulating layer; this wave is then transmitted to the second metal layer, where the signal can be directly recovered as an electrical voltage.

    • Y. Kajiwara
    • , K. Harii
    •  & E. Saitoh

  • Letter |

    The addition of shear orthogonal to the tension-loading plane of crack propagation generates an instability that results in three-dimensional helical crack propagation, atomically rough surfaces and a fracture pattern resembling a series of lance shapes. Here numerical simulations reveal a new law that governs crack propagation in space for materials subject to general stress conditions.

    • Antonio J. Pons
    •  & Alain Karma

  • News & Views |

    A neat mode of operation of the atomic force microscope has been used to probe the interface between mica and water. The results help to settle a long-standing debate about the nature of this interface.

    • Joost W. M. Frenken
    •  & Tjerk H. Oosterkamp

  • News & Views |

    Catastrophic breakage of brittle materials such as ceramics is usually triggered by the rapid spreading of cracks. Computer simulations have now cracked the three-dimensional details of this process.

    • Markus J. Buehler
    •  & Zhiping Xu

  • News & Views |

    Superconductivity has been discovered in the materials that form when alkali metals react with a solid hydrocarbon. This is the first new class of organic, high-temperature superconductor in a decade.

    • Matthew J. Rosseinsky
    •  & Kosmas Prassides

  • Letter |

    Many technological materials are intentionally 'doped' with foreign elements to impart new and desirable properties, a classic example being the doping of semiconductors to tune their electronic behaviour. Here lanthanide doping is used to control the growth of nanocrystals, allowing for simultaneous tuning of the size, crystallographic phase and optical properties of the hybrid material.

    • Feng Wang
    • , Yu Han
    •  & Xiaogang Liu

  • Letter |

    Ferroelectrics are electro-active materials that can store and switch their polarity, sense temperature changes, interchange electric and mechanical functions, and manipulate light. Subtle changes in the topology of certain chemical bonds have long been identified as a possible route for achieving ferroelectricity in organic molecular crystals. Ferroelectricity above room temperature is now demonstrated by applying an electric field to coherently align the molecular polarities in crystalline croconic acid.

    • Sachio Horiuchi
    • , Yusuke Tokunaga
    •  & Yoshinori Tokura

  • Letter |

    Many plants and animals make use of biological surfaces with structural features at the micro- and nanometre-scale that control the interaction with water. The appearance of dew drops on spider webs is an illustration of how they are one such material capable of efficiently collecting water from air. The water-collecting ability of the capture silk of the Uloborus walckenaerius spider is now shown to be the result of a unique fibre structure that forms after wetting.

    • Yongmei Zheng
    • , Hao Bai
    •  & Lei Jiang

  • News & Views |

    The thermal process known as Joule heating, which often plagues electronic devices, has been turned to good use: making devices that can produce sound as well as reproduce music and speech.

    • Rama Venkatasubramanian

  • Letter |

    Although deformation twinning in crystals controls the mechanical behaviour of many materials, its size-dependence has not been explored. Using micro-compression and in situ nano-compression experiments, the stress required for deformation twinning is now found to increase drastically with decreasing sample size of a titanium alloy single crystal, until the sample size is reduced to one micrometre; below this point, deformation twinning is replaced by dislocation plasticity.

    • Qian Yu
    • , Zhi-Wei Shan
    •  & Evan Ma

  • Letter |

    In the search to reduce our dependency on fossil-fuel energy, new plastic materials that are less dependent on petroleum are being developed, with water-based gels — hydrogels — representing one possible solution. Here, a mixture of water, 3% clay and a tiny amount of a special organic binder is shown to form a transparent hydrogel that can be moulded into shape-persistent, free-standing objects and that rapidly and completely self-heals when damaged.

    • Qigang Wang
    • , Justin L. Mynar
    •  & Takuzo Aida

  • News & Views |

    The use of magnetic fields to assemble particles into membranes provides a powerful tool for exploring the physics of self-assembly and a practical method for synthesizing functional materials.

    • Jack F. Douglas

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