Physical sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) quantum dots (QDs) have promising electronic properties which might be further tailorable by defect engineering. Here the authors describe a room temperature aqueous based synthesis of TMD QDs with controlled defect concentration, and demonstrate the correlation between defect concentration and biomedical activity.

    • Xianguang Ding
    • , Fei Peng
    •  & David Tai Leong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    CO2 conversion to reduced products provides a use for greenhouse gases, but reaction complexity stymies mechanistic studies. Here, authors present a microkinetic model for CO2 and CO reduction on copper, based on ab initio simulations, to elucidate pH’s impact on competitive reaction pathways.

    • Xinyan Liu
    • , Philomena Schlexer
    •  & Karen Chan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photonic crystals can steer, shape, and sculpture the flow of photons. Here, the author fabricate a deep-subwavelength photonic crystal slab that supports ultra-confined phonon polaritons, by patterning a nanoscale hole array in h-BN.

    • F. J. Alfaro-Mozaz
    • , S. G. Rodrigo
    •  & A. Y. Nikitin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors fabricate a device that integrates multiple computer-generated holograms into a single colour print. Under white light, a colour image is seen, whereas illumination with a red, green, or blue beam from a handheld laser pointer projects three different holograms onto a distant screen.

    • Kevin T. P. Lim
    • , Hailong Liu
    •  & Joel K. W. Yang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Label-free molecular-level quantification of MicroRNA (miRNA) remains challenging. Here, the authors develop a new surface plasmon resonance sensor based on two-dimensional nanomaterial of antimonene for the specific label-free detection of clinically relevant biomarkers such as miRNA-21 and miRNA-155.

    • Tianyu Xue
    • , Weiyuan Liang
    •  & Qiaoliang Bao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Singlet exciton fission – the separation of photoexcited singlet states into two triplet states – holds promise for enhancing photocurrents in photovoltaic technologies. Krishnapriya et al. characterize how electron delocalization over the bridges in a series of pentacene dimers controls this process.

    • K. C. Krishnapriya
    • , Palas Roy
    •  & Satish Patil

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The scalability of printable integrated circuits is lagging far behind that of conventional silicon-based technologies. Here, Kwon et al. show a three-dimensional integration approach by stacking printeddual-gate organic transistors on plastic foils with a density of 60 transistors per centimeter square.

    • Jimin Kwon
    • , Yasunori Takeda
    •  & Sungjune Jung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    DnaB helicases are motor proteins that couple ATP-hydrolysis to the movement of the protein along single-stranded DNA leading to a separation of double-stranded DNA at the replication fork. Here authors use solid-state NMR spectroscopy and reveal DnaB’s conformational responses to ATP hydrolysis and the resulting DNA loading and translocation.

    • Thomas Wiegand
    • , Riccardo Cadalbert
    •  & Beat H. Meier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The wave nature of light and particles is of interest to the fundamental quantum mechanics. Here the authors show the double-slit interference effect in the strong-field ionization of neon dimers by employing COLTRIMS method to record the momentum distribution of the photoelectrons in the molecular frame

    • Maksim Kunitski
    • , Nicolas Eicke
    •  & Reinhard Dörner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Core/shell semiconductor nanocrystals have advantageous optoelectronic properties, which depend on the shell architecture. Here the authors show that by reducing the growth rate of ZnS shells on ZnSe nanorods the shell morphology can be tuned from flat to islands-like to helical

    • Botao Ji
    • , Yossef E. Panfil
    •  & Uri Banin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influence of 'fake news’, spread via social media, has been much discussed in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. Here, the authors use data on 30 million tweets to show how content classified as fake news diffused on Twitter before the election.

    • Alexandre Bovet
    •  & Hernán A. Makse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ultrathin nanopore membranes have the potential for detecting topological variation in DNA. Here the authors use barcoded DNA to characterise the translocation profiles of DNA with single strand gaps.

    • Ke Liu
    • , Chao Pan
    •  & Aleksandra Radenovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Development of fuel cells and metal-air batteries is hindered by electrocatalyst performance, which can be enhanced with uniform and atomically dispersed active sites. Here the authors report an iron-based electrocatalyst for oxygen reduction in cathodes for a zinc-air battery and a hydrogen-air fuel cell.

    • Yuanjun Chen
    • , Shufang Ji
    •  & Yadong Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gas-sensing materials are of increasing societal importance, but the ability to differentiate between similarly sized gases remains highly challenging. Here the authors report on a porous ferrimagnet that distinguishes diamagnetic N2 and CO2 gases from paramagnetic O2 gas.

    • Wataru Kosaka
    • , Zhaoyuan Liu
    •  & Hitoshi Miyasaka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding what happens to the liquid in melt pools during welding and metal-based additive manufacturing remains a challenge. Here, the authors directly image internal melt pool dynamics using synchrotron radiation to show surface tension affects flow speed, orientation and surface turbulence.

    • Lee Aucott
    • , Hongbiao Dong
    •  & Helen. V. Atkinson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In standard SERS the probability for the molecules to reach tiny hotpot regions is low. Here, the authors introduce an approach based on warped spaces that offers a strategy to manipulate hotspots of metallic nanostructures, resulting in large broadband enhancements in both the magnitude and the volume size.

    • Peng Mao
    • , Changxu Liu
    •  & Shuang Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Control of spin wave transport in magnonic crystals is vital for magnonic devices. Here the authors show low-loss spin-wave manipulation in nanometer thick magnonic crystals of discrete YIG stripes separated by air or CoFeB filled grooves exhibiting tunable bandgaps of 50–200 MHz.

    • Huajun Qin
    • , Gert-Jan Both
    •  & Sebastiaan van Dijken

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Weaker ferritic/matensitic steels rather than stronger austenitic steels are usually candidates for nuclear reactors since they do not easily swell under irradiation. Here, the authors make an ultrastrong lanthanum-doped nanocrystalline austenitic steel that is thermally stable and radiation-tolerant.

    • Congcong Du
    • , Shenbao Jin
    •  & Tongde Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Atomically-clean interfaces are required in heterostructures. Here, authors report a method for fast and parallel removal of contaminants from fully-formed heterostructures, including sample intentionally exposed to polymers and solvent, achieving room temperature mobility over 180,000 cm2/Vs for graphene.

    • D. G. Purdie
    • , N. M. Pugno
    •  & A. Lombardo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plasmons confined in field effect transistors were long envisioned for resonant detection of light at THz frequencies, however realization of such photodetectors has proven challenging. Here, the authors fabricate antenna-coupled graphene transistors which exhibit resonant photoresponse to incident radiation and use them to study plasmons in graphene and its moiré superlattices.

    • Denis A. Bandurin
    • , Dmitry Svintsov
    •  & Georgy Fedorov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quasi-1D magnetic insulators are very attractive for searching and studying quantum many-body phenomena. Here the authors report the four-spinon excitations in quasi-1D spin-chain cuprate Sr2CuO3 by momentum resolved RIXS technique which provides a new route for the creation of magnetic excitations in 1D materials.

    • J. Schlappa
    • , U. Kumar
    •  & T. Schmitt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Topological one-way fibers are promising candidates for novel fiber devices. Here, Lu et al. propose that one-way fiber modes are topologically protected by the second Chern number in a four-dimensional parameter space, which develop in a helically-modulated magnetic Weyl photonic crystal.

    • Ling Lu
    • , Haozhe Gao
    •  & Zhong Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Vertical charge transport through homogeneous WSe2 layers can be effectively tuned by the layer number and contacting metals deposited. Here, the authors report WSe2 vertical diodes with superior device performance characteristics based on variable WSe2 thickness and gadolinium and platinum contact metals.

    • Ghazanfar Nazir
    • , Hakseong Kim
    •  & Suyong Jung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The study of interfaces in bacterial systems is of relevance to the spreading of bacterial colonies and pathological infections. Here the authors investigate the dynamics of active/passive interfaces in bacterial swarms and find that the boundary can be described as a propagating, diffuse elastic interface.

    • Alison E. Patteson
    • , Arvind Gopinath
    •  & Paulo E. Arratia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sugars are known to form from the UV photoprocessing of ices under astrophysical conditions. Here, the authors report the detection of deoxyribose, the sugar of DNA, and other deoxysugars from the UV photoprocessing of H2O:CH3OH ice mixtures, which are compared with materials from carbonaceous meteorites.

    • Michel Nuevo
    • , George Cooper
    •  & Scott A. Sandford

  • Article
    | Open Access

    For many applications, quantum random number generation should be fast and independent from assumptions on the apparatus. Here, the authors devise and implement an approach which assumes a trusted detector but not a trusted source, and allows random bit generations at ~17 Gbps using off-the-shelf components.

    • Marco Avesani
    • , Davide G. Marangon
    •  & Paolo Villoresi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strand displacement is commonly used in DNA nanotechnology to program dynamic interactions between individual DNA strands. Here, the authors describe a tile displacement principle that is similar in concept but occurs on a larger structural level: the displacement reactions take place between DNA origami tiles, allowing reconfiguration of entire systems of interacting DNA structures.

    • Philip Petersen
    • , Grigory Tikhomirov
    •  & Lulu Qian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Water-based semiconducting polymer nanoparticles are eco-friendly and non-toxic but their performance suffers from the surfactants. Here Xie et al. design an approach to minimize the amount of residual surfactant in these nanoparticles and make high-efficiency and stability solar cells.

    • Chen Xie
    • , Thomas Heumüller
    •  & Christoph J. Brabec

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To realize the potential of soft hybrid (inorganic-organic) materials for thermoelectrics, the underlying transport-related physics must be understood. Here, the authors extend the Kang-Synder framework with experimental analysis to gain insight on the thermoelectric transport in hybrid materials.

    • Pawan Kumar
    • , Edmond W. Zaia
    •  & Kedar Hippalgaonkar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Developing new technologies for the neuromodulation of the vagus nerve can enable therapeutic strategies for body weight control in obese patients. Here, the authors present a battery-free self-powered implantable vagus nerve stimulation system that electrically responds to stomach movement.

    • Guang Yao
    • , Lei Kang
    •  & Xudong Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The methylammonium lead halide perovskites have shown excellent optoelectronic properties but the field-effect transistors are much less studied. Here Yu et al. synthesize micrometer-thin crystals of perovskites with low surface contamination and make ambipolar transistor devices with high mobilities.

    • Weili Yu
    • , Feng Li
    •  & Aram Amassian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Similarly to entropy, majorization allows to quantify deviation from uniformity in a wide range of fields. In this paper, the authors use its generalization to the quantum realm to derive a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions for thermal transformations of quantum states.

    • Gilad Gour
    • , David Jennings
    •  & Iman Marvian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Power dissipation is usually unavoidable in transistor channels due to the inelastic scattering of electrons. Here, Firdaus et al. propose a nanoscaled silicon electron-aspirator to remove this constraint, which shows enhanced current output by 3 times at 8 K without additional power supply.

    • Himma Firdaus
    • , Tokinobu Watanabe
    •  & Yukinori Ono

  • Article
    | Open Access

    High expression of Mcl-1 promotes tumorigenesis and resistance to anticancer therapies. Here they report a macrocyclic molecule with high selectivity and affinity for Mcl-1 that exhibits potent anti-tumor effects as single agent and in combination with bortezomib or venetoclax in preclinical models of multiple myeloma and acute myeloid leukemia.

    • Adriana E. Tron
    • , Matthew A. Belmonte
    •  & Alexander W. Hird

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chiroptical sensing in complex mixtures remains a challenging task. Here, the authors report an efficient coumarin probe for chiroptical click chirality sensing of absolute configuration, concentration and enantiomeric excess of several compound classes. The method can be directly applied to crude asymmetric reaction mixtures.

    • F. Yushra Thanzeel
    • , Kaluvu Balaraman
    •  & Christian Wolf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Significant improvements in numerical methods for quantum systems often come from finding new ways of representing quantum states that can be optimized and simulated more efficiently. Here the authors demonstrate a method to calculate exact neural network representations of many-body ground states.

    • Giuseppe Carleo
    • , Yusuke Nomura
    •  & Masatoshi Imada

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cubic crystalline single networks of large open-space lattices are ubiquitous in nature. Here the authors show that the topology of the circumferential bilayer of polymer cubosomes differentiates between two non-intersecting pore networks embedded in the cubic mesophase by sealing one channel network at the interface.

    • Yunju La
    • , Jeongeun Song
    •  & Kyoung Taek Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cyclic polymers can be usually accessed by ring-expansion and ring-closure approaches. Here, the authors report an alternative blocking-cyclization technique which enables the tunable synthesis of multicyclic polymers via commercial Ru-based Grubbs catalysts and conventional ring-opening metathesis polymerisation.

    • Jie Chen
    • , Hongfei Li
    •  & Meiran Xie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To realize the potential of resistive RAM crossbar arrays as platforms for neuromorphic computing, reduced network-level energy consumption must be achieved. Here, the authors use a hardware/software co-design approach to realize reduced energy consumption during network training for the network.

    • Yuhan Shi
    • , Leon Nguyen
    •  & Duygu Kuzum

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The flammability and toxicity of the currently used electrolytes are the concerns that must be addressed. Here the authors show a non-fluorinated and non-toxic ionomeric aqueous gel electrolyte called water-in-ionomer that allows an enlargement of electrochemical stability window and design of environmentally friendly battery cell chemistries.

    • Xin He
    • , Bo Yan
    •  & Elie Paillard

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