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Electrically programmable Fourier-synthesized acoustic tweezers enable facile manipulation of micrometre-sized objects, colloids and living cells in a lab-on-chip device that combines high throughput with minimal invasive yet highly tunable force fields.
Early time transient absorption microscopy in quantum dot solids reveals anomalous exciton transport with multiple different temporal regimes within hundreds of femtoseconds after photoexcitation.
Spins become polarized along their momenta when travelling through chiral tellurium nanowires. The signs of chirality and current determine the orientations of polarized spins while the spin density can be tuned by electrical gating, current and external magnetic field.
Double-shelled hollow spheres comprising of different catalytic materials are shown to enhance the efficiency of catalytic processes for the selective conversion of hydrogen and carbon monoxide to gasoline.
Bioelectronics demand stretchable devices with steady performance under deformation. By combining an amphiphilic organic semiconducting polymer with tailored film processing, highly stretchable organic electrochemical transistors are demonstrated.
Coupling between nanoscale self-assembly and capillary pattern formation leads to ordered thin films with multiscale structure spanning six orders of magnitude.
A composite membrane that contains porous organic cages is shown to be dynamic, with pore aperture diameter controlled by solvent allowing for graded molecular sieving.
Plastic yielding of metallic glasses is mediated by strain softening, which promotes localized failure and impairs engineering predictability. Unravelling the mechanisms associated with this plastic flow behaviour lays the groundwork for reliable engineering design of this elusive material.
A prototypical biocomposite block comprising a blend of bacteria, fungi and feedstock can be assembled into human-sized, living structures with self-healing and environmental sensing capabilities.
Mobile electrons dressed with the crystal electric field of localized f orbitals form a new type of quasiparticle in a rare-earth material with a devil’s staircase magnetic structure.
The exceptional quality of hexagonal boron nitride crystals that can be cleaved into few layers provides ultrathin dielectrics, thereby opening a route to ultrasmall capacitors with large capacitances. With such capacitors, the superconducting transmon qubit is scaled down by orders of magnitude.
This Perspective reviews the complementary developments in synthetic biology and biomaterials and discusses how convergence of these two fields creates a promising design strategy for the fabrication of tailored living materials for medicine and biotechnology.
Upon decreasing the electron density in a two-dimensional electronic system to a critical value, a transition should occur from a quantum to a classical regime. An oxide now shows electrical properties marking such a transition.
Imaging the magnetic structure in non-centrosymmetric nanoparticles reveals the emergence of a new spin texture, the skyrmionic vortex, stabilized through a chiral geometric frustration.
Revealing the molecular orientations of anisotropic materials is desired in materials science and soft-matter physics. Now, an optical diffraction tomographic approach enables the direct reconstruction of dielectric tensors of anisotropic structures in three dimensions.
A simple one-step method that enables the random copolymerization of two monomers with different solubility in ionic liquids creates phase-separated elastic and stiff domains that result in ultra-tough and stretchable ionogels.
