Surfaces, interfaces and thin films articles from across Nature Portfolio

By inserting an epitaxial in-plane buffer layer of Bi₅FeTi₃O₁₅, an artificial flux closure architecture enables ferroelectric polarization from a single unit cell of BaTiO₃ or BiFeO₃.

The Kondo effect — the screening of an impurity spin by conduction electrons — is a fundamental many-body effect. However, recent experiments combined with simulations have caused a long-standing model system for the single-atom Kondo effect to fail.

Understanding vortex pinning in high-temperature superconducting materials is crucial to optimizing their properties. This Technical Review analyses the impact of growth method on vortex microstructure.

Examples of 2D heavy-fermion materials are rare, and the details of their electronic structure have remained elusive. Here, Nakamura et al. report the synthesis and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements of a monolayer Kondo lattice, YbCu₂, on a Cu(111) surface with an estimated coherence temperature of 30 K.

Ice formation on grooved surfaces is ubiquitous, but controlling orientation is difficult due to lack of mechanistic insight. Here, the authors observed oriented growth using graphene oxide nanosheets as probes, revealing the effect of groove size, and programmed ice growth to fabricate freeze-cast metamaterials.

By inserting an epitaxial in-plane buffer layer of Bi₅FeTi₃O₁₅, an artificial flux closure architecture enables ferroelectric polarization from a single unit cell of BaTiO₃ or BiFeO₃.

An article in Nature Physics presents experimental evidence for spinaronic states in Co atoms on a Cu(111) surface.

The Kondo effect — the screening of an impurity spin by conduction electrons — is a fundamental many-body effect. However, recent experiments combined with simulations have caused a long-standing model system for the single-atom Kondo effect to fail.

Local thermodynamic measurements of a twisted transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructure reveal competition between unconventional charge order and Hofstadter states. This results from the presence of both flat and dispersive electronic bands, whose energetic ordering can be experimentally tuned.

Circularly polarized photoexcitation initiates spin domain formation in polycrystalline halide perovskite films with strong spin–orbit coupling and local inversion symmetry breaking, as revealed by ultrafast optical microscopy.

Coupling between electrons and water hydrons at the graphene–water interface provides a new way to cool heat in graphene.