Nanoscience and technology articles within Nature

Featured

  • Research Briefing |

    When circularly polarized light hits an array of chiral gold nanoparticles, it generates polarized electric and magnetic waves across the surface of the nanoparticles. Chiral molecules can alter these resonances, providing a highly sensitive method to determine and quantify molecular chirality, even at very low concentrations.

  • Article |

    An array of 2D crystals of isotropic, 432-symmetric chiral gold nanoparticles is shown to exhibit collective resonances with a strong and uniform chiral near field, allowing enantioselective detection by the collective circular dichroism.

    • Ryeong Myeong Kim
    • , Ji-Hyeok Huh
    •  & Ki Tae Nam

  • Article |

    Spin correlation experiments are demonstrated in an electron entangler device based on the ‘splitting’ of Cooper pairs from a superconductor, which can potentially be used to investigate many fundamental phases and processes related to the electron spin.

    • Arunav Bordoloi
    • , Valentina Zannier
    •  & Andreas Baumgartner

  • Research Briefing |

    Conventional manufacturing methods struggle to meet the increasing demand for microscopic and nanoscale products, because small things are difficult to manipulate. An innovative machine that uses a water–air interface to grab and manoeuvre microscopic objects might be a powerful tool in this race-to-the-smallest.

  • Article |

    DNA-mediated assembly of hollow nanoparticles can be used in an edge-bonding approach to design and synthesize nanoscale open-channel superlattices, with control of symmetry, geometry and topology.

    • Yuanwei Li
    • , Wenjie Zhou
    •  & Chad A. Mirkin

  • Research Briefing |

    Molecular networks have been developed that can classify complex mixtures of DNA sequences that cannot be categorized by a single linear classifier. To do this, artificial ‘neurons’ powered by enzymes are wired together to form an architecture that mimics the structure of a neural network.

  • Article |

    A molecular ratchet, in which a crown ether is pumped from solution onto an encoded molecular strand by a pulse of chemical fuel, opens the way for the reading of information along molecular tapes.

    • Yansong Ren
    • , Romain Jamagne
    •  & David A. Leigh

  • Article |

     Mimicking traditional digital neural networks with DNA-encoded ‘enzymatic’ neurons overcomes issues with other chemical approaches, and could allow notable increases in miniaturization and molecular implementation of these AI models, with potential applications including DNA data storage or cancer diagnosis.

    • S. Okumura
    • , G. Gines
    •  & A. J. Genot

  • Article |

    Preparing crystals held together with macromolecular bonds can create shape memory materials that can be engineered to exhibit a wide range of reversible changes useful for chemical sensing, optics and robotics.

    • Seungkyu Lee
    • , Heather A. Calcaterra
    •  & Chad A. Mirkin

  • News & Views |

    The movement of electric charges in light-activated catalyst particles is key to the water-splitting reaction, which could be used to generate hydrogen as a renewable fuel. Such movement has now been observed in exquisite detail.

    • Ulrich Aschauer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The universal control of six qubits in a 28Si/SiGe quantum dot array is demonstrated, achieving Rabi oscillations for each qubit with visibilities of 93.5–98.0%, implying high readout and initialization fidelities.

    • Stephan G. J. Philips
    • , Mateusz T. Mądzik
    •  & Lieven M. K. Vandersypen

  • News & Views |

    Porous solids have been dispersed in water to produce suspensions that can carry much more oxygen than blood can. Such ‘porous water’ opens the way to water-based formulations for biomedical use.

    • Margarida Costa Gomes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A compute-in-memory neural-network inference accelerator based on resistive random-access memory simultaneously improves energy efficiency, flexibility and accuracy compared with existing hardware by co-optimizing across all hierarchies of the design.

    • Weier Wan
    • , Rajkumar Kubendran
    •  & Gert Cauwenberghs

  • Nature Index |

    Breakthroughs in nanotechnology could offer wide-ranging benefits to a host of industries, from agriculture to computing, but getting public buy-in remains key.

    • Bec Crew

  • Nature Index |

    From nano-filters for tackling water pollution to protein fingerprinting that treats disease, these researchers are making their mark on the field.

    • Gemma Conroy
    •  & Benjamin Plackett

  • News & Views |

    Soft magnetic materials can be magnetized and demagnetized by weak magnetic fields, but lack the strength, toughness and malleability needed for many applications. An alloy that solves this problem has now been developed.

    • Easo P. George

  • Research Briefing |

    Microscopic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have applications ranging from augmented-reality displays to large-screen products, but their brightness typically decreases as their size is reduced. A solution to this problem has now been found and used to manufacture bright blue nanoscale LEDs.

  • Article |

    Clean van der Waals contacts of high-work-function metals have been demonstrated on few- and single-layered MoS2 and WSe2, leading to p-type characteristics on single-layer MoS2 and purely p-type characteristics on WSe2.

    • Yan Wang
    • , Jong Chan Kim
    •  & Manish Chhowalla

  • Article |

    The ability to resolve single atoms in a liquid environment is demonstrated by combining a transmission electron microscope and a robust double graphene liquid cell, enabling studies of adatom motion at solid–liquid interfaces.

    • Nick Clark
    • , Daniel J. Kelly
    •  & Sarah J. Haigh

  • News & Views |

    The race is on to develop nanometre-scale motors for future tiny machines. The latest entry is a multi-component motor that self-assembles from DNA, harnesses Brownian motion to spin a rotor, and can wind up a molecular spring.

    • Henry Hess

  • Article |

    By examining three model pyroelectric materials with different bonding characters along the out-of-plane direction, it is shown that their pyroelectric coefficients increase rapidly when the thickness of free-standing sheets becomes small.

    • Jie Jiang
    • , Lifu Zhang
    •  & Jian Shi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A nanoscale rotary motor made of DNA origami, driven by ratcheting and powered by an external electric field, shows the ability to wind up a spring and has mechanical capabilities approaching those of biological motors.

    • Anna-Katharina Pumm
    • , Wouter Engelen
    •  & Hendrik Dietz

  • Perspective |

    Developments, challenges and opportunities in using two-dimensional materials for the next generation of non-volatile spin-based memory technologies are reviewed, and possible disruptive improvements are discussed.

    • Hyunsoo Yang
    • , Sergio O. Valenzuela
    •  & Stephan Roche

  • News & Views |

    Two-dimensional materials made of carbon have been limited to monolayers of atoms, such as graphene. Sheets composed of connected buckyballs — spherical clusters of atoms — have now been made by peeling layers from a crystal.

    • J. Michael Gottfried

  • Article |

    Using a chemical vapour deposition method, it is possible to epitaxially grow wafer-scale single-crystal trilayers of hexagonal boron nitride—an important dielectric for 2D materials—on Ni (111) foils by boron dissolution.

    • Kyung Yeol Ma
    • , Leining Zhang
    •  & Hyeon Suk Shin

  • Article |

    Electrically controlled quantum confinement of excitons to below 10 nm is achieved in a 2D semiconductor by combining in-plane electric fields with interactions between excitons and free charges.

    • Deepankur Thureja
    • , Atac Imamoglu
    •  & Puneet A. Murthy

  • Article |

    Light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers in a gold–graphene–gold heterostructure is demonstrated, and used to create a logic gate for application in lightwave electronics.

    • Tobias Boolakee
    • , Christian Heide
    •  & Peter Hommelhoff

  • Article |

    A solid-state single-electron qubit platform is demonstrated based on trapping and manipulating isolated single electrons on an ultraclean solid neon surface in vacuum, which performs near the state of the art for a charge qubit.

    • Xianjing Zhou
    • , Gerwin Koolstra
    •  & Dafei Jin

  • Article |

    Three tunable quantum Hall broken-symmetry states in charge-neutral graphene are identified by visualizing their lattice-scale order with scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy.

    • Alexis Coissard
    • , David Wander
    •  & Benjamin Sacépé

  • Article |

    Two new plasmon modes are observed in macroscopic twisted bilayer graphene with a highly ordered moiré superlattice, the first being the signature of chiral plasmons and the second a slow plasmonic mode around 0.4 electronvolts.

    • Tianye Huang
    • , Xuecou Tu
    •  & Xiaomu Wang

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