Structural properties articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    We report atomic observations of six incoherent twin boundary configurations and structural transitions in diamond at room temperature, showing a dislocation-mediated mechanism different from metallic systems and shedding new light on grain boundary behaviour.

    • Ke Tong
    • , Xiang Zhang
    •  & Yongjun Tian

  • Article |

    We report that fatigue cracks in pure metals can undergo intrinsic self-healing; they were observed to heal by crack flank cold welding induced by local stress state and grain boundary migration.

    • Christopher M. Barr
    • , Ta Duong
    •  & Brad L. Boyce

  • Article |

    A heterodimensional superlattice consisting of an alternating array of a two-dimensional material and a one-dimensional material shows unconventional octahedral stacking and an unexpected room-temperature anomalous Hall effect.

    • Jiadong Zhou
    • , Wenjie Zhang
    •  & Zheng Liu

  • Article |

    An imaging method combining soft-landing electrospray ion beam deposition and low-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy resolves the structures of glycans at sub-nanometre resolution, revealing the connectivity of glycan chains and the types of linkages.

    • X. Wu
    • , M. Delbianco
    •  & K. Kern

  • Letter |

    Terahertz light pulses induce transitions between a topological and a trivial phase in the Weyl semimetal WTe2 through an interlayer shear strain.

    • Edbert J. Sie
    • , Clara M. Nyby
    •  & Aaron M. Lindenberg

  • Perspective |

    The phenomenon of ultralow friction between sliding incommensurate crystal surfaces—structural superlubricity—is examined, and the challenges and opportunities involved in its extension to the macroscale are assessed.

    • Oded Hod
    • , Ernst Meyer
    •  & Michael Urbakh

  • Letter |

    In copper components containing highly oriented nanotwins, correlated ‘necklace’ dislocations moving back and forth offer an unusually fatigue-resistant response to engineering stress.

    • Qingsong Pan
    • , Haofei Zhou
    •  & Lei Lu

  • Letter |

    Moving mechanical interfaces need to be lubricated to ensure long life and easy slippage; here, a new type of coating is described—comprising nitrides of either molybdenum or vanadium, together with a copper or nickel catalyst—that generates protective tribofilms from lubricating oils.

    • Ali Erdemir
    • , Giovanni Ramirez
    •  & Subramanian K. R. S. Sankaranarayanan

  • Letter |

    Alloying steel with aluminium improves the material’s strength-to-weight ratio, but the resulting formation of brittle intermetallic compounds within the steel matrix reduces its ductility; here the morphology and distribution of the intermetallic precipitates are controlled to alleviate this problem.

    • Sang-Heon Kim
    • , Hansoo Kim
    •  & Nack J. Kim

  • Letter |

    Basal-plane dislocations, identified as fundamental defects in bilayer graphene by transmission electron microscopy and atomistic simulations, reveal striking size effects, most notably a pronounced buckling of the graphene membrane, which drastically alters the strain state and is of key importance for the material’s mechanical and electronic properties.

    • Benjamin Butz
    • , Christian Dolle
    •  & Erdmann Spiecker

  • Letter |

    The hardness, toughness and chemical stability of the well-known superhard material cubic boron nitride have been improved by using a synthesis technique based on specially prepared ‘onion-like’ precursor materials.

    • Yongjun Tian
    • , Bo Xu
    •  & Zhongyuan Liu

  • Letter |

    The well-established self-assembly of surfactant micelles is used to produce a new mesoporous silica structure, a dodecagonal quasicrystal, which offers larger length scales than intermetallic quasicrystals and improved structural quality compared with soft-matter mesoscale quasicrystals.

    • Changhong Xiao
    • , Nobuhisa Fujita
    •  & Osamu Terasaki

  • 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

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