Nanoscale materials articles within Nature

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  • News Feature |

    Researchers have spent 25 years exploring the remarkable properties of fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphene. But commercializing them is neither quick nor easy.

    • Richard Van Noorden

  • News |

    Quantum bit based on electron spin offers advantages for electronics and optical devices.

    • Jon Cartwright

  • News & Views |

    Nanowires are candidates for enabling the exchange of quantum information between light and matter. The rapid control of a single electron spin by solely electrical means brings this possibility closer. See Letter p.1084

    • David J. Reilly

  • Letter |

    Motion of electrons can influence their spins through a fundamental effect called the spin–orbit interaction. Here, a spin–orbit quantum bit (qubit) is implemented in an indium arsenide nanowire, which should offer significant advantages for quantum computing. The spin–orbit qubit is electrically controllable, and information can be stored in the spin. Moreover, nanowires can serve as one dimensional templates for scalable qubit registers, and are suited for both electronic and optical devices.

    • S. Nadj-Perge
    • , S. M. Frolov
    •  & L. P. Kouwenhoven

  • Letter |

    Electron microscopy has advanced to the stage where individual elements can be identified with atomic resolution. Here it is shown to be possible to get fine-structure spectroscopic information of individual light atoms such as those of carbon, and so also probe their chemical state. This capability is illustrated by investigating the edges of a graphene sample, where it is possible to discriminate between single-, double- and triple-coordinated carbon atoms.

    • Kazu Suenaga
    •  & Masanori Koshino

  • News & Views |

    A simple peptide that assembles into desirable nanoscale structures is a striking example of how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. What's more, the assembly process is controllably reversible.

    • Charlotte A. E. Hauser
    •  & Shuguang Zhang

  • Letter |

    The past few years have seen a spectacular growth of interest in graphene. Efforts to produce large sheets of monolayer (or few-layer) graphene could receive a welcome boost from the simple procedure reported by these authors. They show how baking various solid carbon sources (for example polymer films) deposited on a metal catalyst substrate can produce either pristine graphene or doped graphene in a single step.

    • Zhengzong Sun
    • , Zheng Yan
    •  & James M. Tour

  • Letter |

    Single-molecule magnets are molecular complexes with magnetic bistability, and recently it was shown that such a magnetic memory effect is retained for Fe4 clusters when they are wired to a gold surface. These authors have tailored the clusters to have a preferential orientation and form a self-assembled monolayer on the surface. It then becomes possible to observe quantum tunnelling of the magnetization, which shows up as steps in the magnetic hysteresis loop.

    • M. Mannini
    • , F. Pineider
    •  & R. Sessoli

  • News & Views |

    The use of templates to control the morphology of nanostructures is a powerful but inflexible technique. A template that is remodelled during synthesis suggests fresh opportunities for fabricating new nanostructures.

    • Younan Xia
    •  & Byungkwon Lim

  • Letter |

    Many fields would benefit from a simple and efficient method of trapping single particles, but this is extremely difficult when dealing with nanometre-sized objects in solution. These authors show that grooves and pockets etched into fluidic channels that acquire a charge on exposure act as highly effective electrostatic traps. With further optimization, this trapping concept could allow contact-free confinement of single proteins and nanoparticles, their sorting and fractionation, or assembly into high-density arrays.

    • Madhavi Krishnan
    • , Nassiredin Mojarad
    •  & Vahid Sandoghdar

  • Letter |

    In graphene, two particular sets of electrons exist that have a fourfold energy degeneracy. To study the corresponding four quantum states comprising a Landau level, these authors perform measurements on epitaxial graphene at 10 millikelvin. They take spectral 'fingerprints' of the Landau levels, showing in detail how they evolve with magnetic field and how they split into the four separate quantum states. They also observe states with Landau level filling factors of 7/2, 9/2 and 11/2.

    • Young Jae Song
    • , Alexander F. Otte
    •  & Joseph A. Stroscio

  • News & Views |

    Tiny holes have been drilled through individual layers of graphene — atomically thin sheets of carbon — using an electron beam. These nanopores might be useful for the ultrarapid sequencing of single DNA molecules.

    • Hagan Bayley

  • Letter |

    There is much interest in graphene for applications in ultrahigh-speed radio-frequency electronics, but conventional device fabrication processes lead to significant defects in graphene. Here a new way of fabricating high-speed graphene transistors is described. A nanowire with a metallic core and insulating shell is placed as the gate electrode on top of graphene, and source and drain electrodes are deposited through a self-alignment process, causing no appreciable damage to the graphene lattice.

    • Lei Liao
    • , Yung-Chen Lin
    •  & Xiangfeng Duan

  • Letter |

    Graphene is highly electronically conducting across the plane of the material. These authors show that a graphene membrane separating two ionic solutions in electrical contact is strongly ionically insulating despite being atomically thin and has in-plane electronic properties dependent on the interfacial environment. Numerical modelling reveals that very high spatial resolution is possible using this system, and the researchers propose that drilled membranes could form the basis of DNA sequencing devices.

    • S. Garaj
    • , W. Hubbard
    •  & J. A. Golovchenko

  • Letter |

    Advances in nanomagnetics research have brought powerful applications in magnetic sensing technology, but so far no high-resolution magnetic-imaging tool is available to characterize complex, often buried, nanoscale structures. These authors have developed a scanning probe technique in which the intense, confined magnetic field of a micromagnetic probe tip is used to localize the ferromagnetic resonance mode immediately beneath the probe, and demonstrate that they can image magnetic features at a resolution of 200 nm.

    • Inhee Lee
    • , Yuri Obukhov
    •  & P. Chris Hammel

  • Letter |

    The spontaneous assembly of two different types of nanoparticle into ordered superlattices offers a route to designing materials with precisely controlled properties, but available synthesis strategies have many practical limitations. These authors report a fabrication process which overcomes these limitations. They generate large-scale (square-millimetre) binary superlattice structures at a liquid–air interface, allowing the material to be free standing or transferred to any substrate ready for fabrication into useful devices.

    • Angang Dong
    • , Jun Chen
    •  & Christopher B. Murray

  • Letter |

    Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) have structure-dependent electronic properties that make them attractive for the fabrication of nanoscale electronic devices, but exploiting this potential has been hindered by the lack of precise production methods. Here the authors demonstrate how to reliably produce different GNRs, using precursor monomers that encode the structure of the targeted nanoribbon and are converted into GNRs by means of surface-assisted coupling.

    • Jinming Cai
    • , Pascal Ruffieux
    •  & Roman Fasel

  • News & Views |

    For many potential applications, carbon nanotubes must be chemically modified, but the reactions involved aren't easily controlled. The discovery of a reversible modification process is a step towards such control.

    • Maurizio Prato

  • Letter |

    The strength of conventional metals is determined by the interaction of dislocations with obstacles such as grain boundaries. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that the strength of ultrafine-grained copper containing twin boundaries can be controlled by a dislocation nucleation mechanism activated below a critical twin thickness. Below this thickness the material becomes softer. The smaller the grains, the smaller the critical twin boundary spacing, and the higher the metal's maximum strength.

    • Xiaoyan Li
    • , Yujie Wei
    •  & Huajian Gao

  • Letter |

    Many technological materials are intentionally 'doped' with foreign elements to impart new and desirable properties, a classic example being the doping of semiconductors to tune their electronic behaviour. Here lanthanide doping is used to control the growth of nanocrystals, allowing for simultaneous tuning of the size, crystallographic phase and optical properties of the hybrid material.

    • Feng Wang
    • , Yu Han
    •  & Xiaogang Liu

  • News |

    Nanowires growing from bacteria might link up distant chemical reactions in sediments.

    • Katharine Sanderson

  • News & Views |

    The use of magnetic fields to assemble particles into membranes provides a powerful tool for exploring the physics of self-assembly and a practical method for synthesizing functional materials.

    • Jack F. Douglas

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