Physical chemistry articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article |

    Solution-processed blue lasers are used in many applications such as spectroscopy or material processing. Here, the authors demonstrate a borane solution-based blue laser that offers a high efficiency and a photostability that is superior to commercial laser dyes.

    • Luis Cerdán
    • , Jakub Braborec
    •  & Michael G. S. Londesborough

  • Article |

    Pickering emulsions are particle-stabilized droplets suspended in an immiscible liquid, and the study of individual droplet coalescence has yielded many interesting findings. Here, Wu et al. move towards larger droplet numbers to investigate the influence of population on coalescence.

    • Tong Wu
    • , Haitao Wang
    •  & Chongzheng Na

  • Article |

    Grain boundaries between crystalline domains in solution-processed organic semiconductor thin films are believed to inhibit charge transport, but their structure is invisible to conventional characterization techniques. Wong et al. show the existence of nano-crystalline aggregates at domain interfaces.

    • Cathy Y. Wong
    • , Benjamin L. Cotts
    •  & Naomi S. Ginsberg

  • Article |

    Redox flow batteries are a promising technique for large-scale electricity storage, but suffer from low energy density and volumetric capacity. Here, the authors present a lithium redox flow battery with a sulphur-impregnated carbon composite as the catholyte, which leads to substantial performance improvement.

    • Hongning Chen
    • , Qingli Zou
    •  & Yi-Chun Lu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Azobenzene is perhaps the archetypal light-activated molecule, widely used for photoswitching applications, but the mechanism of isomerisation remains in doubt. Here, the authors provide high-resolution excitation spectra of trans-azobenzene, identifying the structural changes accompanying photoisomerisation.

    • Eric M. M. Tan
    • , Saeed Amirjalayer
    •  & Wybren Jan Buma

  • Article |

    Compounds such as acetate and pyruvate are useful probes for MRI, but their hyperpolarization relies on difficult and expensive dynamic nuclear polarization techniques. Here, the authors show how parahydrogen-induced polarization can be used to quickly and inexpensively hyperpolarize these compounds.

    • Francesca Reineri
    • , Tommaso Boi
    •  & Silvio Aime

  • Article |

    Liquid and gas phases are indistinguishable at supercritical conditions. Here, Gallo et al.show that this convention is not precisely true for supercritical water on approaching its critical point due to the existence of the Widom line, which separates a liquid-like and a gas-like regime on its two sides.

    • P. Gallo
    • , D. Corradini
    •  & M. Rovere

  • Article |

    Helium is an atom of great scientific interest, yet much debate exists surrounding the shape its molecules form. Here Voigtsberger et al. present experimental results imaging the wavefuction of 4He3 and 3He4He2 trimer systems, which suggest that 4He3 is a random cloud while 3He4He2is a quantum halo state.

    • J. Voigtsberger
    • , S. Zeller
    •  & R. Dörner

  • Article |

    There is extensive research in the topochemistry of molecular systems at high pressure, although studies of binary gas mixtures are rarer. Here, the authors study a nitrogen/hydrogen mixture under pressure, identifying new van der Waals compounds and probing the room-temperature, high-pressure chemistry.

    • Dylan K. Spaulding
    • , Gunnar Weck
    •  & Michael Hanfland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    X-ray scattering experiments give details of the electrons in a system, although typically this is dominated by core and inert valence electrons. Here, the authors report a method to follow changes in the chemically active valence electrons, and use it to study the reaction mechanism of a pericyclic reaction.

    • Timm Bredtmann
    • , Misha Ivanov
    •  & Gopal Dixit

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Van der Waals interactions are difficult to calculate at an atomistic level for moderate sized structures due to the many distinct atoms involved. Here, the authors measure the van der Waals force between an organic molecule and a metal surface, examining the non-additive part of these interactions.

    • Christian Wagner
    • , Norman Fournier
    •  & F. Stefan Tautz

  • Article |

    Adhesion forces depend on the strength and density of the individual molecular interactions of which they are composed. Here, the authors use surface force apparatus and atomic force microscopy to experimentally probe the scaling of single-molecule interactions into macroscopic properties.

    • Sangeetha Raman
    • , Thomas Utzig
    •  & Markus Valtiner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite the technological relevance of molecular thin films, there is limited understanding of their growth on a molecular level. Here, the authors characterize the relevant processes in real time and determine energy parameters using a combination of X-ray techniques and kinetic Monte Carlo simulations.

    • S. Bommel
    • , N. Kleppmann
    •  & S. Kowarik

  • Article |

    Complex patterns arise in the non-linear growth regime upon the injection of a less viscous fluid into a more viscous one. Here, the authors show that the viscosity ratio between the two fluids controls a transition from branched fingers to blunt structures, and then eventually to a stable displacement.

    • Irmgard Bischofberger
    • , Radha Ramachandran
    •  & Sidney R. Nagel

  • Article |

    Carnot efficiency is the highest theoretically possible efficiency that a heat engine can have. Verley et al.use the fluctuation theorem to show that the Carnot value is the least likely efficiency in the long time limit.

    • Gatien Verley
    • , Massimiliano Esposito
    •  & Christian Van den Broeck

  • Article |

    There has been a great deal of interest in single-atom heterogeneous catalysis recently. Here, the authors show that industrially relevant lanthanum oxide-doped alumina supports are capable of stabilizing atomically dispersed palladium species, which are evaluated for low-temperature carbon monoxide oxidation.

    • Eric J. Peterson
    • , Andrew T. DeLaRiva
    •  & Abhaya K. Datye

  • Article |

    Growth of salt crystals in pores is one of the most damaging weathering mechanisms for stone in ornamental structures and historical buildings. Here, the authors present a simple yet powerful treatment for predicting when salt damage will occur, quantifying this susceptibility to salt crystallization.

    • Robert J. Flatt
    • , Francesco Caruso
    •  & George W. Scherer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electrons can behave as if they are at a temperature different from that of the solid in which they are embedded. Here, the authors demonstrate a room temperature device that can generate electrons with an effective temperature of 45 K by using quantum wells to filter out energetic particles.

    • Pradeep Bhadrachalam
    • , Ramkumar Subramanian
    •  & Seong Jin Koh

  • Article |

    In chemical compounds, alkali metal ions typically assume a positive oxidation state where they lose an electron, and only rarely are in a charge state where they receive an electron. Here, the authors predict lithium cesides with oxidation states where caesium receives more than one electron.

    • Jorge Botana
    •  & Mao-Sheng Miao

  • Article |

    Developments in ultrafast optical science bring the promise of being able to directly monitor atomic motions during various physical processes. Towards this end, Xu et al.present fixed-angle broadband laser-induced electron scattering as a method to image molecular structures from photoelectron spectra.

    • Junliang Xu
    • , Cosmin I. Blaga
    •  & Louis F. DiMauro

  • Article |

    Glass fragility characterises the rate of change in viscosity as a liquid is cooled towards the glass transition temperature. Here, the authors demonstrate via neutron diffraction that the rate at which structural ordering occurs within the melt correlates with kinetic fragility in a range of metallic glass samples.

    • N. A. Mauro
    • , M. Blodgett
    •  & K. F. Kelton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ultracold Rydberg atoms — atoms with highly excited electrons — can form molecules with ground state atoms. By tuning the principal quantum number of the Rydberg state, Gaj et al.study the transition from resolvable molecular lines to the mean shift regime, where indistinguishable lines form a band.

    • A. Gaj
    • , A. T. Krupp
    •  & T. Pfau

  • Article |

    Uranium dioxide fuels the world’s nuclear-power reactors, and so a full understanding of its thermal properties is essential. Gofryk et al. now demonstrate that, despite its cubic atomic structure, the thermal conductivity of uranium dioxide is anisotropic owing to phonon-spin scattering.

    • K. Gofryk
    • , S. Du
    •  & D. A. Andersson

  • Article |

    It is challenging to prepare colloidal crystals with long-range order for their applications. Mahynski et al. propose a method to achieve this goal through tailoring energy loss of absorbed polymers in crystal voids to selectively stabilize one crystal structure among its competing polymorphs.

    • Nathan A. Mahynski
    • , Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos
    •  & Sanat K. Kumar

  • Article |

    Wall–fluid interactions are known to have a large influence on the physics of confined glasses. Here, the authors observe a multiple re-entrant glass transition for a polydisperse hard-sphere system confined between two surfaces, when the wall separation distance is of the order of a few particle diameters.

    • Suvendu Mandal
    • , Simon Lang
    •  & Fathollah Varnik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Grain rotation is proposed as an active deformation mechanism in nanocrystalline metals at room temperature. Here, during in-situatomic scale experimentation, the authors observe that grains with a size <6 nm deform by coordinated rotation of multiple grains, associated with dislocation climb at grain boundaries.

    • Lihua Wang
    • , Jiao Teng
    •  & Xiaodong Han

  • Article |

    The organization of ions at solid–liquid interfaces is of interest in many fields, but little information at the nanoscale is available. Here, the authors report atomic-level observations of ordering of ions at surfaces in solutions, which is driven by water instead of the conventional electrostatic correlations.

    • Maria Ricci
    • , Peter Spijker
    •  & Kislon Voïtchovsky

  • Article |

    It is a huge challenge to measure long-range atom–surface interactions, the Casimir–Polder effects, at elevated temperatures. Here, Laliotis et al.report a spectroscopic measurement on caesium atoms approximately 100 nm away from a hot sapphire surface, influenced by the thermal excitation of surface modes.

    • Athanasios Laliotis
    • , Thierry Passerat de Silans
    •  & Daniel Bloch

  • Article |

    It is not well-understood how nanoscale variations in surface structures impact the ordering of the first few wetting layers on oxide surfaces. Here, the authors employ a model surface, a hydroxylated iron oxide film, which allows direct probing of the impact of hydroxyl groups on the adsorbed water molecules.

    • Lindsay R. Merte
    • , Ralf Bechstein
    •  & Flemming Besenbacher

  • Article |

    Understanding the dynamics of molecules exposed to intense X-ray beams is crucial to ongoing efforts in biomolecular imaging with free-electron lasers. Here, the authors study C60molecules interacting with femtosecond X-ray free-electron laser pulses and present a model based on classical and quantum physics.

    • B. F. Murphy
    • , T. Osipov
    •  & N. Berrah

  • Article |

    Chemical reactions are typically composed of a number of elementary steps, but elucidating these steps is a challenge, particularly in the condensed phase. Here, the authors use quantum chemical calculations and single-molecule spectroscopy to unravel the details of a reversible redox process.

    • Yuwei Zhang
    • , Ping Song
    •  & Weilin Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Carbon monoxide clathrate hydrate has been widely studied and although the structure-II gas hydrate is predicted to be thermodynamically favourable, it is the structure-I hydrate that has been observed. Here, the authors synthesize the structure-II carbon monoxide hydrate and probe its structure and formation.

    • Jinlong Zhu
    • , Shiyu Du
    •  & Yusheng Zhao

  • Article |

    The study of excited triplet states in molecular systems is in some cases hindered by the difficulty in accessing them and the intense signals of singlet states. Here, the authors show that the combination of polarized light and molecular alignment can enhance the triplet absorption for sulphur dioxide.

    • Camille Lévêque
    • , Daniel Peláez
    •  & Richard Taïeb

  • Article |

    Fluorescent organic nanoparticles are attractive alternatives to quantum dots for imaging applications. Here, the authors assemble dyes with bulky counterions inside polymer nanoparticles to achieve high fluorescence brightness, as well as a photoinducible and reversible on/off switching.

    • Andreas Reisch
    • , Pascal Didier
    •  & Andrey S. Klymchenko

  • Article |

    Roaming dynamics have been shown to be important in unimolecular decompositions, but the relevance to bimolecular reactions has been less clear. Here, the authors study radical addition/elimination reactions and implicate a roaming transition state in a bimolecular reaction.

    • Baptiste Joalland
    • , Yuanyuan Shi
    •  & Alexander M. Mebel

  • Article |

    The surface chemistry of aqueous solutions plays a ubiquitous role in many chemical and biological processes. Here, the authors probe the surfaces of sodium halide solutions with surface-specific femtosecond vibrational spectroscopy, and observe surface concentrations of halide ions several times greater than in the bulk.

    • Lukasz Piatkowski
    • , Zhen Zhang
    •  & Mischa Bonn

  • Article |

    Materials with variable and reversible thermal conductivities are important in technologies, and yet such materials are rare. Here, Cho et al. report in situmeasurements of thermal conductivity of lithium cobalt oxide, and show how to reversibly modulate thermal conductivities over a considerable range.

    • Jiung Cho
    • , Mark D. Losego
    •  & Paul V. Braun

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