Nanoscience and technology articles within Nature

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Nanoscale devices have now been made that mimic biological connections in the brain by responding to the relative timing of signals. This achievement might lead to the construction of artificial neural networks for computing applications.

    • Dmitri B. Strukov

  • Editorial |

    The United Kingdom and others must not overlook the potential for nanotechnology to boost regenerative medicine.

  • Comment |

    Basing regulations on a term with no scientific justification will do more harm than good, argues Andrew D. Maynard.

    • Andrew D. Maynard

  • Career Brief |

    Online tool will help female nanoscientists to develop their careers.

  • Letter |

    Scanning probe techniques such as atomic force microscopy can be readily harnessed to prepare nanoscale structures with exquisite resolution, but are not in general suited for high-throughput patterning. Techniques based on contact printing, on the other hand, offer high throughput over large areas, but can't compete on resolution. Now, an approach is described that offers the best of both worlds: by attaching an array of hard, scanning-probe-like silicon tips to a flexible elastomeric substrate (similar to those used in contact printing), it is possible to rapidly create arbitrary patterns with sub-50-nm resolution over centimetre-scale areas.

    • Wooyoung Shim
    • , Adam B. Braunschweig
    •  & Chad A. Mirkin

  • Letter |

    Many biomineralized tissues (such as teeth and bone) are hybrid inorganic–organic materials whose properties are determined by their convoluted internal structures. Now, using a chiton tooth as an example, this study shows how the internal structural and chemical complexity of such biomaterials and their synthetic analogues can be elucidated using pulsed-laser atom-probe tomography.

    • Lyle M. Gordon
    •  & Derk Joester

  • 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

  • Comment |

    What was the impact of the nanotechnology funding boom of the past ten years? Philip Shapira and Jue Wang have scrutinized the literature to find out.

    • Philip Shapira
    •  & Jue Wang

  • News & Views |

    An approach that entails printing compound-semiconductor ribbons on a silicon substrate offers the means to build nanoscale transistors that can be switched on and off much more effectively than their bulk analogues. See Letter page 286

    • John A. Rogers

  • Letter |

    A potential route to enhancing the performance of electronic devices is to integrate compound semiconductors, which have superior electronic properties, within silicon, which is cheap to process. These authors present a promising new concept to integrate ultrathin layers of single-crystal indium arsenide on silicon-based substrates with an epitaxial transfer method borrowed from large-area optoelectronics. With this technique, the authors fabricate thin-film transistors with excellent device performance.

    • Hyunhyub Ko
    • , Kuniharu Takei
    •  & Ali Javey

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    Methods for trapping tiny particles are increasingly needed, especially for biological assays, but they often involve complicated apparatus. An approach has been discovered that could simplify matters considerably. See Letter p.692

    • Jan C. T. Eijkel
    •  & Albert van den Berg

  • News & Views |

    The resonant behaviour of clusters of gold nanoparticles has been tuned by gradually bringing the particles together. The approach could have many applications, including chemical and biological sensing.

    • Mark I. Stockman

  • Letter |

    Quantum entanglement is one of the key resources required for quantum computation. In superconducting devices, two-qubit entangled states have been used to implement simple quantum algorithms, but three-qubit states, which can be entangled in two fundamentally different ways, have not been demonstrated. Here, however, three superconducting phase qubits have been used to create and measure these two entangled three-qubit states.

    • Matthew Neeley
    • , Radoslaw C. Bialczak
    •  & John M. Martinis

  • News |

    Spiralling electron beams have the potential to measure and manipulate the properties of single atoms.

    • Zeeya Merali

  • News Feature |

    The US National Nanotechnology Initiative has spent billions of dollars on submicroscopic science in its first 10 years. Corie Lok finds out where the money went and what the initiative plans to do next.

    • Corie Lok

  • 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 |

    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 |

    Metamaterials have the counterintuitive optical property of negative refraction index. They have a wide range of possible applications, including 'invisibility cloaks' and perfect lenses, but their performance is severely limited by absorption losses. These authors have incorporated an optical gain medium within a metamaterial as a way to compensate the intrinsic loss, and show that optical pumping leads to a significantly improved negative refraction index and figure of merit within the 722–738-nm visible wavelength range.

    • Shumin Xiao
    • , Vladimir P. Drachev
    •  & Vladimir M. Shalaev

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Nanoscience and technology across other nature.com journals