Physical chemistry articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Molecular self-assemblies have potential as photon processing materials, yet observation of exciton delocalization dynamics can be challenging. Here, the authors experimentally demonstrate Frenkel exciton dynamics of H-type aggregates, studying delocalisation of excitons directly after photoexcitation.

    • Jooyoung Sung
    • , Pyosang Kim
    •  & Dongho Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Endowing composite materials with spatially discrete mechanical behaviours is possible by varying the internal concentration and arrangement of particles. Here, the authors demonstrate a 3D magnetic printing technique which enables the fabrication of materials with intricate internal designs.

    • Dimitri Kokkinis
    • , Manuel Schaffner
    •  & André R. Studart

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is economic impetus to achieve low-temperature carbon monoxide oxidation. Here, the authors use time-resolved diffuse reflectance infrared spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to show that platinum carbonates formed reversibly from platinum/aluminium oxide can oxidize carbon monoxide at room temperature.

    • Mark A. Newton
    • , Davide Ferri
    •  & Maarten Nachtegaal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bubble generation during boiling is essential to power generation and heating/cooling systems, but it remains uncontrollable even with state-of-the-art surface engineering. Cho et al. electrostatically attract surfactants to the surface, on which bubble nucleation is manipulated in an on-demand manner.

    • H. Jeremy Cho
    • , Jordan P. Mizerak
    •  & Evelyn N. Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Iron and nitrogen doped carbon materials are widely studied electrocatalysts, however measurement of features such as intrinsic turn-over frequency and active site utilization has proved difficult. Here, the authors use a combination of chemisorption and spectroscopy techniques to determine these properties.

    • Nastaran Ranjbar Sahraie
    • , Ulrike I. Kramm
    •  & Peter Strasser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The phenomenon of crystallization is common in nature, but surprisingly the nucleation pathways from liquid to solid are poorly understood due to the lack of effective experimental probes. Yoo et al. observe the existence of a nucleation precursor in titanium dioxide using single-pulse electron microscopy.

    • Byung-Kuk Yoo
    • , Oh-Hoon Kwon
    •  & Ahmed H. Zewail

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The two-dimensional material black phosphorus could find uses in energy applications. Here, the authors study the difference in in-plane thermal conductivity along the armchair and zigzag directions in suspended few-layer black phosphorus, and show the dependence of this anisotropy on sample thickness.

    • Zhe Luo
    • , Jesse Maassen
    •  & Xianfan Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A major challenge in following electron transfer through dithiol/disulfide exchange is the dearth of accompanying spectroscopic effects. Here, the authors use single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer experiments to illuminate disulfide bond rearrangements within the enzyme quiescin sulfhydryl oxidase.

    • Iris Grossman
    • , Haim Yuval Aviram
    •  & Deborah Fass

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An artificial functional mimic of cytochrome coxidase is a long term research goal for the development of oxygen reduction electrocatalysts. Here, the authors use site directed mutants of myoglobin to develop an electrocatalyst for reducing oxygen to water under ambient conditions.

    • Sohini Mukherjee
    • , Arnab Mukherjee
    •  & Abhishek Dey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Establishing structure–property relationships for catalytic materials is essential for optimization of performance. Here, the authors solve the structure of molybdenum disulfide monolayers, and probe the role of lithium intercalation and the subsequent effects on catalytic hydrogen activation.

    • Stanley S. Chou
    • , Na Sai
    •  & C. Jeffrey Brinker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Typically, in order to form large peptides, complex procedures or activating agents are required. Here, the authors show that simple aqueous conditions with dehydration-hydration cycles are sufficient for the oligomerization of amino acids into peptides (up to 20 amino acids long) in yields of up to 50%.

    • Marc Rodriguez-Garcia
    • , Andrew J. Surman
    •  & Leroy Cronin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mechanically induced conformational modulation can be used to control the conductance of single molecules junctions, but it is hard to be realized due to broken junctions. Here, the authors probe three-dimensional dynamics of Si/single-molecule/Si junctions, whose conductance shows a binary change.

    • Miki Nakamura
    • , Shoji Yoshida
    •  & Hidemi Shigekawa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fundamental mechanisms of doping organic semiconductors are poorly understood compared with their inorganic counterparts. Here, the authors demonstrate that small conjugated molecules and conjugated polymers exhibit fundamentally different phenomena upon doping despite similar compositions.

    • Henry Méndez
    • , Georg Heimel
    •  & Ingo Salzmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Experimental data from angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy can be utilized on molecular films to retrieve real-space images of molecular orbitals in two dimensions. Here, by scanning initial states as a function of photon energy, the authors can reconstruct three-dimensional orbital images.

    • S. Weiß
    • , D. Lüftner
    •  & P. Puschnig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The composition of oxide compounds controls many of their properties and electronic phases. Here, the authors show that entropy and configurational disorder can stabilize new phases of oxides, potentially enabling a better engineering of their properties.

    • Christina M. Rost
    • , Edward Sachet
    •  & Jon-Paul Maria

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Glass transition shows dramatic dynamic slowdown, but its origin remains unclear. Here, Xia et al. observe in granular systems the rapid growth of a geometrically frustrated polytetrahedral order with packing fraction, which is spatially correlated with the slow dynamics.

    • Chengjie Xia
    • , Jindong Li
    •  & Yujie Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although photodriven molecular motors—capable of converting light into unidirectional motion—hold promise for many applications, these typically require ultraviolet light. Here, the authors design and analyse a motor that can operate at high speeds (kHz) under visible light at ambient temperature.

    • Manuel Guentner
    • , Monika Schildhauer
    •  & Henry Dube

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hybridization-type band gaps are known to persist in phononic crystals, but their fabrication remains challenging for all-solid hypersonic composites. Here, the authors utilize the elastic anisotropy at the interface of polymer-tethered colloidal particles to control phonon propagation in GHz regime.

    • E. Alonso-Redondo
    • , M. Schmitt
    •  & G. Fytas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conjugated polymers in thin films exhibit low fluorescence quantum yields, but the mechanism is still unclear. Here, Huet al. show the trade-off between charge transfer and emissive exciton states, whilst the former can be suppressed via dielectric-induced stabilization for large fluorescence quantum yields.

    • Zhongjian Hu
    • , Adam P. Willard
    •  & David A. Vanden Bout

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recently, periodic arrays of thermally active nanomagnets with bistable magnetization have been built which mimic the behaviour of frustrated magnets and model Ising systems. Here, the authors use muon spin relaxation to evidence thermodynamic phase transitions in an artificial kagome ice system.

    • L. Anghinolfi
    • , H. Luetkens
    •  & L. J. Heyderman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Detection and manipulation of single charges in molecules are fundamental cornerstones in molecular electronics. Here, Steurer et al. demonstrate a technique with the use of an atomic force microscope that is able to resolve charge states and single electron charge transfer between molecules.

    • Wolfram Steurer
    • , Shadi Fatayer
    •  & Gerhard Meyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hot electrons—electrons with very high kinetic energies—are important in many processes but difficult to observe due to their short lifetimes. Here, the authors analyse STM based nonlocal manipulation of organic molecules on a surface, showing that the measurements probe hot electron dynamics in real space.

    • D. Lock
    • , K. R. Rusimova
    •  & P. A. Sloan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Manipulation of single molecules can be achieved using scanning probe microscopy but the influence of molecular conformation on this process has, until now, been unclear. Here, the authors probe two different types of porphyrin conformer on a surface and see strong differences in their mechanochemical response.

    • S. P. Jarvis
    • , S. Taylor
    •  & P. Moriarty

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The structural heterogeneity in liquid water is commonly believed to disappear beyond 50 fs due to the strong intermolecular interaction. Here, the authors show frequency-dependent vibrational relaxation, which indicates the persistence of structural heterogeneity on a picosecond timescale.

    • Sietse T. van der Post
    • , Cho-Shuen Hsieh
    •  & Johannes Hunger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Laplace NMR provides complementary information to traditional NMR, such as details of molecular motion. Here, the authors report a correlation experiment capable of providing information on the physical environment of molecules while enhancing the chemical resolution and greatly reducing the experiment times.

    • Susanna Ahola
    • , Vladimir V Zhivonitko
    •  & Ville-Veikko Telkki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Covalency is a fundamental concept in chemical bonding, but experimentally it is not possible to measure the degree of covalency of a particular bond. Here, the authors report a model to link the covalency of hydrogen bonds in water with the anisotropy of the magnetic shielding tensor in the proton NMR.

    • Hossam Elgabarty
    • , Rustam Z. Khaliullin
    •  & Thomas D. Kühne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Selective standoff detection of explosives is challenging due to the presence of volatile interferents. Here, the authors report dendrimer thin films that display distinct fluorescence responses when exposed to explosives as opposed to common interferents, allowing selective detection of nitrated explosives.

    • Yan Geng
    • , Mohammad A. Ali
    •  & Paul E. Shaw

  • Article |

    Proton migration in the acetylene cation is commonly used as a model to study isomerisation dynamics. Here, the authors use X-ray pump-probe experiments to study this process, and show that isomerization occurs significantly faster than expected—within the first 12 femtoseconds following core ionization.

    • Chelsea E. Liekhus-Schmaltz
    • , Ian Tenney
    •  & Vladimir S. Petrovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rydberg atoms are promising platform for quantum simulations, due to their strong and controllable dipole–dipole interactions. Here, the authors predict few-body processes in Rydberg atoms which resemble fluorescence resonance energy transfer in biological setting, and observe them in cold caesium atoms.

    • R. Faoro
    • , B. Pelle
    •  & P. Pillet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The conversion of carbon dioxide to useful products is a major challenge in energy research. Here, the authors report a cobalt protoporphyrin immobilized on graphite that is capable of the selective and efficient electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide, primarily to carbon monoxide, in acidic media.

    • Jing Shen
    • , Ruud Kortlever
    •  & Marc T. M. Koper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is extensive research into water-oxidation electrocatalysts which exhibit long-term stability. Here, the authors report a single-crystal cobalt oxide electrocatalyst displaying high activity and stability, and develop an in situX-ray diffraction method to probe the structure–activity relationship.

    • Ching-Wei Tung
    • , Ying-Ya Hsu
    •  & Hao Ming Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photo-charged battery devices are an attractive technology but suffer from low photo-electric storage conversion efficiency and poor cycling stability. Here, the authors demonstrate the use of perovskite solar cells in conjunction with a lithium ion battery which displays excellent properties.

    • Jiantie Xu
    • , Yonghua Chen
    •  & Liming Dai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Water molecules can exist in one of two nuclear spin states—ortho or para. Here, the authors look at the bulk dielectric constant of water molecules enclosed in fullerenes (capable of rotating even at cryogenic temperatures) and show that it changes as the water molecules convert from ortho to para.

    • Benno Meier
    • , Salvatore Mamone
    •  & Malcolm H. Levitt

  • Article |

    Singly dispersed bimetallic catalysts should exhibit different behaviour and activity to bulk bimetallic species. Here, the authors fabricate isolated Rh1Co3bimetallic catalytic sites and demonstrate their high activity and selectivity for nitric oxide reduction.

    • Shiran Zhang
    • , Luan Nguyen
    •  & Franklin Tao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Solution printing is a desirable route for manufacturing organic solar cells, whilst the major challenge lies with morphology control. Here, Diao et al.use a microstructured blade to guide the solution flow during printing, which improves polymer crystallization and the resulting device performance.

    • Ying Diao
    • , Yan Zhou
    •  & Zhenan Bao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Silicon carbide possesses myriad properties which render it an ideal material for implementation in harsh radiation environments. Here, the authors show that damaged SiC can be repaired through ionization-induced healing, which has broader implications for the design of future radiation-tolerant materials.

    • Yanwen Zhang
    • , Ritesh Sachan
    •  & William J. Weber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Surface recombination velocity can have a major impact on solar cell performance. Here, Yanget al. measure surface recombination dynamics in perovskite single crystals using broadband transient reflectance spectroscopy. Grain size is crucial to avoid the effects of surface recombination on carrier lifetime.

    • Ye Yang
    • , Yong Yan
    •  & Matthew C. Beard

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