Techniques and instrumentation articles from across Nature Portfolio

Selection principles for precursors are decoded from phase diagrams and applied to the synthesis of inorganic oxide materials.

An optical fibre-fed superconducting electro-optic modulator with gigahertz bandwidth and attojoule per bit electric power consumption offers a fast, efficient means to connect superconducting circuits to the room temperature environment.

A non-common-path interferometric scheme enables holographic detection of single proteins of mass 90 kDa and estimation of single-protein polarizability.

Material properties prediction from a given microstructure is important for accelerated design but a comprehensive methodology is lacking. Here, a multi-method machine learning approach is utilized to understand the processing-structure-property relationship for differently processed porous materials.

Surface photovoltage microscopy as described in this protocol allows high spatial and energy resolution mapping of surface-charge distributions on photocatalyst particles, enabling rational design of improved materials.

Pulse tube refrigerators are a critical enabling technology for many disciplines that require low temperatures, including quantum computing. Here, the authors show that dynamically optimizing the acoustic parameters of the refrigerator can improve conventional cooldown speeds up to 3.5 times.

Martensite in Ti-6Al-4V is known to decompose under heating. This study employs rapid laser heating in situ in a synchrotron to study changes in the diffraction profiles during the martensite decomposition process.

The authors characterize the phonon modes at the FeSe/SrTiO₃ interface with atomically resolved electron energy loss spectroscopy and correlate them with accurate atomic structure in an electron microscope. They find several phonon modes highly localized at the interface, one of which engages in strong interactions with the electrons in FeSe.

A powerful technique with broad applications, operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is widely used but there is a lack of design and reporting standards. Focusing on water-splitting electrocatalysts, we propose best practices for the reproducibility, replicability and reliability of operando XAS studies.

Selection principles for precursors are decoded from phase diagrams and applied to the synthesis of inorganic oxide materials.

An optical fibre-fed superconducting electro-optic modulator with gigahertz bandwidth and attojoule per bit electric power consumption offers a fast, efficient means to connect superconducting circuits to the room temperature environment.

A non-common-path interferometric scheme enables holographic detection of single proteins of mass 90 kDa and estimation of single-protein polarizability.

A distance-based mapping strategy using single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer via DNA eXchange (FRET X) enables full-length fingerprinting of intact protein sequences.

Artificial intelligence is used to automate the synthesis of single molecules using the tip of a scanning probe microscope, as well as to extract chemical information from these reactions.