Synthesis and processing articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    Diamond crystals and polycrystalline diamond films can be grown using liquid metal at standard pressure and high temperature instead of conventional high pressure and high temperature.

    • Yan Gong
    • , Da Luo
    •  & Rodney S. Ruoff

  • Article |

    Fast and scalable synthesis of a variety of transition metal telluride nanosheets by solid lithiation and hydrolysis is demonstrated and several interesting quantum phenomena were observed, such as quantum oscillations and giant magnetoresistance.

    • Liangzhu Zhang
    • , Zixuan Yang
    •  & Hui-Ming Cheng

  • Article |

    Cascaded compression, in which nanopores are compressed by cycles of shrinkage and expansion, is described, leading tohigh-density nanopores in monolayer graphene with a narrow pore-size distribution, left skewness and ultrasmall tail deviation.

    • Jiangtao Wang
    • , Chi Cheng
    •  & Jing Kong

  • Article |

    Following a micro-then-nano growth sequence to fabricate composites that are blends of block-copolymer-based supramolecules, small molecules and nanoparticles shows that high-performance barrier materials can be manufactured by means of entropy-driven assembly.

    • Emma Vargo
    • , Le Ma
    •  & Ting Xu

  • Article |

    Stacks of van der Waals superconductor heterostructures comprising many layers and several blocks of two-dimensional materials have been grown in a highly controllable manner at a wafer scale using a high-to-low temperature strategy.

    • Zhenjia Zhou
    • , Fuchen Hou
    •  & Libo Gao

  • Article |

    We discovered that liquid metal endowing negative mixing enthalpy with other elements could provide a stable thermodynamic condition and act as a desirable dynamic mixing reservoir, realizing the synthesis of high-entropy alloy nanoparticles.

    • Guanghui Cao
    • , Jingjing Liang
    •  & Lei Fu

  • Article |

    Using a chemical vapour deposition method, it is possible to epitaxially grow wafer-scale single-crystal trilayers of hexagonal boron nitride—an important dielectric for 2D materials—on Ni (111) foils by boron dissolution.

    • Kyung Yeol Ma
    • , Leining Zhang
    •  & Hyeon Suk Shin

  • Article |

    Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, fractional edge excitations are observed in nanographene spin chains, enabling the potential to study strongly correlated phases in purely organic materials.

    • Shantanu Mishra
    • , Gonçalo Catarina
    •  & Roman Fasel

  • Article |

    Polymer-covered inorganic nanoparticles are designed to self-assemble into micrometre-sized superlattice crystallites that can subsequently be built into freestanding centimetre-scale solids with hierarchical order across seven orders of magnitude.

    • Peter J. Santos
    • , Paul A. Gabrys
    •  & Robert J. Macfarlane

  • Article |

    Using lanthanide-doped nanomaterials and flexible substrates, an approach that enables flat-panel-free, high-resolution, three-dimensional imaging is demonstrated and termed X-ray luminescence extension imaging.

    • Xiangyu Ou
    • , Xian Qin
    •  & Xiaogang Liu

  • Article |

    The epitaxial growth of single-crystal hexagonal boron nitride monolayers on a copper (111) thin film across a sapphire wafer suggests a route to the broad adoption of two-dimensional layered semiconductor materials in industry.

    • Tse-An Chen
    • , Chih-Piao Chuu
    •  & Lain-Jong Li

  • Letter |

    Phosphorene nanoribbons are produced in liquids through the intercalation of black phosphorous crystals with lithium ions, enabling the search for predicted exotic states and applications of these nanoribbons.

    • Mitchell C. Watts
    • , Loren Picco
    •  & Christopher A. Howard

  • Letter |

    Molten-salt-assisted chemical vapour deposition is used to synthesize a wide variety of two-dimensional transition-metal chalcogenides.

    • Jiadong Zhou
    • , Junhao Lin
    •  & Zheng Liu

  • Letter |

    Superlattices consisting of alternating monolayer atomic crystals and molecular layers allow access to stable phosphorene monolayers with competitive transistor performance and to bulk monolayer materials with tunable optoelectronic properties.

    • Chen Wang
    • , Qiyuan He
    •  & Xiangfeng Duan

  • Letter |

    An approach is developed for the continuous fabrication of lateral multi-junction heterostructures of transition-metal dichalcogenides, in which the sequential formation of heterojunctions is achieved solely by changing the composition of the reactive gas environment in the presence of water vapour.

    • Prasana K. Sahoo
    • , Shahriar Memaran
    •  & Humberto R. Gutiérrez

  • Letter |

    A bottom-up process to achieve rapid growth of micrometre-sized three-dimensional nanocrystal superlattices during colloidal synthesis at high temperatures is revealed by in situ small-angle X-ray scattering; the process is applicable to several colloidal materials.

    • Liheng Wu
    • , Joshua J. Willis
    •  & Christopher J. Tassone

  • Letter |

    Nanometre-scale columnar structures in tooth enamel inspire novel nanocomposites containing layers of vertically aligned nanowires, produced by layer-by-layer fabrication and combining high values of both storage modulus and energy dissipation.

    • Bongjun Yeom
    • , Trisha Sain
    •  & Nicholas A. Kotov

  • 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 |

    Synthesis of atomically precise zigzag edges in graphene nanoribbons is demonstrated using a bottom-up strategy based on surface-assisted arrangement and reaction of precursor monomers; these nanoribbons have edge-localized states with large energy splittings.

    • Pascal Ruffieux
    • , Shiyong Wang
    •  & Roman Fasel

  • Letter |

    Micrometre-sized particles covered with stiff, nanoscale spikes are shown to exhibit long-term colloidal stability in both hydrophilic and hydrophobic media, without the need for chemical coating, owing to the effect of the spikes on the contact area and, consequently, the force between the particles.

    • Joong Hwan Bahng
    • , Bongjun Yeom
    •  & Nicholas Kotov

  • Letter |

    Nanotwinned diamond synthesized with onion carbon nanoparticles as precursors has much higher hardness and thermal stability than natural diamond; its enhanced hardness is due to the reduced size of its twin structures.

    • Quan Huang
    • , Dongli Yu
    •  & Yongjun Tian

  • Letter |

    The unusual ordering of quasicrystals can be induced in thin films of a regular crystalline material; here a two-dimensional quasicrystal has been achieved by growing thin films of the perovskite barium titanate on an appropriately oriented crystalline platinum substrate.

    • Stefan Förster
    • , Klaus Meinel
    •  & Wolf Widdra

  • Letter |

    Silver nanoparticles are susceptible to oxidation and have accordingly received less attention than gold nanoparticles; ultrastable silver nanoparticles are now reported, which can be produced in very large quantities as a single-sized molecular product, and the origins of their enhanced stability are elucidated using a single-crystal X-ray structure and first-principles calculations.

    • Anil Desireddy
    • , Brian E. Conn
    •  & Terry P. Bigioni

  • Letter |

    A method of producing perovskite-sensitized solar cells by sequential — as opposed to single-step — deposition of the perovskite’s components onto a nanoporous titanium oxide film allows for greater reproducibility of device performance and a record power conversion efficiency of 15 per cent.

    • Julian Burschka
    • , Norman Pellet
    •  & Michael Grätzel

  • 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 |

    Aerotaxy, an aerosol-based growth method, is used to produce gallium arsenide nanowires with a growth rate of about 1 micrometre per second, which is 20 to 1,000 times higher than previously reported for traditional nanowires and allows sensitive and reproducible control of the nanowires’ optical and electronic properties.

    • Magnus Heurlin
    • , Martin H. Magnusson
    •  & Lars Samuelson

  • Article |

    Metal nanoparticles with dimensions below ten nanometres exhibit plasmon resonances governed by quantum mechanical effects, as probed with electron microscopy and spectroscopy

    • Jonathan A. Scholl
    • , Ai Leen Koh
    •  & Jennifer A. Dionne

  • 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

Browse broader subjects

Browse Synthesis and processing across other nature.com journals