Soft materials articles within Nature Materials

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  • News & Views |

    Colloidal structures and lattices made of patchy particles with chemically distinct lobes are formed by exploring site-specific depletion forces. This approach introduces a simple route to assemble colloidal superlattices.

    • Bas G. P. van Ravensteijn
    • , Patrick A. Hage
    •  & Ilja K. Voets

  • News & Views |

    Non-fullerene acceptors have successfully overcome energy losses that were thought to be unavoidable in organic solar cells based on fullerene derivatives. However, it is now shown that they have limits too.

    • Justin M. Hodgkiss

  • Article |

    A graphene nanocomposite hydrogel showing anisotropic swelling is used to realize an electrically conducting and removable bioadhesive that improves the mechanical and electrical integration of bioelectronics devices with wet dynamic tissues.

    • Jue Deng
    • , Hyunwoo Yuk
    •  & Xuanhe Zhao

  • News & Views |

    Polymeric glasses with significant thermodynamic and kinetic stability have been fabricated using physical vapour deposition, providing a mean to gather insight into the properties of glasses aged for millions of years.

    • Juan J. de Pablo

  • Article |

    Experiments and molecular dynamics simulations show that the dehydration-induced actuation of nanoporous tripeptide crystals is a result of pore contraction caused by the strengthening of the water hydrogen-bonding network inside the pore, which creates mechanical stress that deforms the crystal lattice.

    • Roxana Piotrowska
    • , Travis Hesketh
    •  & Xi Chen

  • Article |

    The physical vapour deposition of ultrastable monodispersed polymer glasses is reported. This technique allows for the high tunability of glass transition temperatures of the deposited polymers, which could be useful for technological applications.

    • Adam N. Raegen
    • , Junjie Yin
    •  & James A. Forrest

  • Letter |

    Relaxor ferroelectric polymers are a material of choice for applications such as electrostrictive actuators or electrocaloric cooling. Here, the origin of relaxor behaviour at the molecular level is investigated and found to arise from conformational disorder.

    • Yang Liu
    • , Bing Zhang
    •  & Qing Wang

  • News & Views |

    Programmable DNA hybridization is used to mediate the self-assembly of substrate-bound DNA-grafted gold nanoparticles into single-crystalline Winterbottom and non-Winterbottom constructions with particular size, shape and orientation.

    • Chang Liu
    •  & Qian Chen

  • Letter |

    A cell culture interfacing an organic neuromorphic device in a microfluidic system reversibly modifies the device synaptic weight through chemical reactions mediated by the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter used in biological synapses.

    • Scott T. Keene
    • , Claudia Lubrano
    •  & Francesca Santoro

  • News & Views |

    Magnetite crystals form by the aggregation and subsequent merger of crystalline precursors, which can be interpreted in terms of colloidal assembly.

    • Jeffrey D. Rimer

  • News & Views |

    A high-speed, high-gain enhancement-mode ion-gated transistor shows promise for low-power chronically implanted bioelectronic systems.

    • Scott Keene
    •  & Yoeri van de Burgt

  • News & Views |

    Two initially neutral conjugated semiconducting polymers are found to transfer electrons when put in contact in the solid state, leading to mutual electrical doping.

    • Bernard Kippelen

  • News & Views |

    Low-electron-dose liquid-cell transmission electron microscopy reveals a two-step nucleation process during the crystallization of triangular nanoplatelets in water at the single-particle level.

    • Yilong Han

  • Article |

    The progressive stiffening of the solid–solid contacts that freeze dense colloidal suspensions are shown to cause the macroscopic ageing of such materials.

    • Francesco Bonacci
    • , Xavier Chateau
    •  & Anaël Lemaître

  • News & Views |

    Photonic crystals with optical bandgaps across the entire visible spectrum are generated by reconfiguring three-dimensional blue phase liquid crystalline lattices into long-lived metastable non-cubic structures using sequences of electric pulses.

    • Slobodan Žumer

  • News & Views |

    A transparent, high-permittivity elastomeric dielectric material shows potential for light-emitting soft robots and stretchable optoelectronics that can self-heal.

    • Jonathan Rossiter

  • News & Views |

    Polymer precipitation under turbulent flow is used for the high-throughput synthesis of soft microparticles with fractal coronas that display significant adhesive properties.

    • Theodore Hueckel
    •  & Stefano Sacanna

  • Article |

    Low-dose liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy, particle tracking and numerical simulations are used to characterize the crystallization kinetics and pathways of gold nanoprisms at the single-particle level.

    • Zihao Ou
    • , Ziwei Wang
    •  & Qian Chen

  • News & Views |

    Physical confinement and magnetic fields are used to align organic molecules that self-assemble into large-size single crystals with perfect positional order.

    • Andrei V. Petukhov

  • News & Views |

    Shape-directed assembly of engineered microparticles enables multicomponent machines that can reconfigure dynamically to control their field-driven locomotion.

    • Kyle J. M. Bishop

  • Letter |

    The kinetics and thermodynamics of the nucleation of magnetite crystals from primary particles are shown to be described by colloidal assembly theory, allowing for predictions of crystal sizes to be made.

    • Giulia Mirabello
    • , Alessandro Ianiro
    •  & Nico A. J. M. Sommerdijk

  • Article |

    A structural investigation on the formation of 3D superlattices of colloidal PbSe quantum dots reveals a topotactic transition from the self-assembled phase of ligand-capped quantum dots to the epitaxially fused phase typical of conductive solids.

    • Alex Abelson
    • , Caroline Qian
    •  & Matt Law

  • Meeting Report |

    Scientists recently gathered in Asilomar, California, to discuss the latest developments in bioelectronics research. Interfaces between our body and advanced technologies for biomedical and other applications are becoming ever more diverse and effective.

    • Nicholas A. Melosh

  • Letter |

    Water clusters induce hole traps in organic semiconductor thin films. Detrimental effects of hole and electron traps on charge transport can be avoided by using materials with ionization energy and electron affinity within an energy window of 2.4 eV.

    • Naresh B. Kotadiya
    • , Anirban Mondal
    •  & Gert-Jan A. H. Wetzelaer

  • News & Views |

    Nanovoids in organic semiconductors can serve as hosts for water inclusions that lead to trapping of electrons and holes.

    • David J. Yaron
    •  & Tomasz Kowalewski

  • News & Views |

    Lewis acids are shown to react with water, forming a complex with Brønsted acidity able to effectively dope semiconducting polymers through backbone protonation and internal charge transfer.

    • Han Yan
    •  & Wei Ma

  • News & Views |

    Materials that permit spatiotemporal control of biomolecule presentation have long been a challenge in the field. A method has now been developed to reversibly pattern cell-laden hydrogels with site-specifically immobilized proteins using sortase-mediated transpeptidation without compromising bioactivity.

    • Jonathan H. Galarraga
    •  & Jason A. Burdick

  • Article |

    Geometric analysis and constrained optimization algorithms allow for the design of kirigami patterns that can be deployed into any two- or three-dimensional shape.

    • Gary P. T. Choi
    • , Levi H. Dudte
    •  & L. Mahadevan

  • Review Article |

    From optoelectronic to biomedical and energy storage applications, the interest in organic mixed ionic–electronic conductors is expanding. This Review describes current understanding of the processes occurring in these materials and their structure–property relations.

    • Bryan D. Paulsen
    • , Klas Tybrandt
    •  & Jonathan Rivnay

  • Article |

    The rotational dynamics of self-propelled microparticles suspended in a colloidal glass is sharply increased at the glass transition of the system while their translation diffusion is strongly hindered.

    • Celia Lozano
    • , Juan Ruben Gomez-Solano
    •  & Clemens Bechinger

  • News & Views |

    Violating the Aufbau principle is shown to be a successful strategy to improve the stability of neutral organic radicals used in organic light-emitting diodes.

    • Sebastian Reineke

  • News & Views |

    Thousands of electron diffraction patterns, collected stepwise by scanning transmission electron microscopy, are synchronized and mined to provide unprecedented maps of the nanostructure of ordered domains in organic electronics films.

    • Gitti L. Frey
    •  & Yaron Kauffmann

  • Letter |

    Rewritable surface charge density gradients enable the direct, high-speed and long-distance transport of droplets on distinct surfaces without the need of additional energy input.

    • Qiangqiang Sun
    • , Dehui Wang
    •  & Xu Deng

  • Article |

    Mobile micromachines with advanced configurations and functions self-assembled through designed dielectrophoretic interactions between structural and motor units.

    • Yunus Alapan
    • , Berk Yigit
    •  & Metin Sitti

  • News & Views |

    Quantitative atomic-scale images of electric potentials at surfaces have now been obtained with a non-contact atomic force microscope by functionalizing the tip as a quantum dot sensor.

    • Mats Persson

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