Tools of the Trade

The wings of the Blue Morpho butterfly are natural photonic structures. Saaj Chattopadhyay explains how they can serve as simple and affordable interfaces to increase the colour and birefringent contrast in polarization microscopy.

Nirel Bernstein presents a technique to measure spin torque of skyrmions in magnetically non-uniform materials.

Atreyie Ghosh explains how photoelectron emission microscopy can help to understand the light–matter interactions of two-dimensional materials.

Yonatan Ossia describes how focussed ion beam milling can help to correlate the emission spectroscopy of quantum dots with electron micrographs.

Avi Schneider discusses how Janus-like magnetic particles can help to study spin-related effects in biomolecules.

Shaurya Aarav introduces a quantum imaging method that uses a high-resolution camera to speed up imaging acquisition while retaining correlation information.

Andres Biondi Vaccariello explains how a femtosecond laser can machine channels in optical fibres to allow their use as gas sensors.

Evan Tillotson describes how scanning electron microscopy imaging can be used to characterize twisted 2D materials.

Marie-Therese Huebsch discusses how cluster-multipole theory can be combined with spin-density-functional theory in VASP to probe magnetism based just on the crystal structure of a material.

Matthew Horton introduces pymatgen, a free and open source code that can be used for materials screenings.

Jeremy Schultz describes how modifying a scanning tunnelling microscope tip for Raman scattering can be used to probe individual atoms and molecules.

Sarah Malik explains how quantum random walks can be used to model the cascades of quarks and gluons resulting from the proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

Amanda J. Carr provides tips on using X-rays to probe interface ions.

Ling Sun describes a data analysis technique that may help with the detection of long-duration gravitational-wave sources.

Fábio Ferreira presents a multiscale approach combining density functional theory and elasticity theory to model twisted 2D bilayers.

John Cenker presents a method for inducing large strains in 2D materials at low temperatures.

Giulia Menichetti describes a deep learning pipeline designed to provide reliable binding predictions for poorly annotated proteins and ligands.

Wendong Wang introduces a new assembly method of ultraclean van der Waals heterostructures that completely avoids the use of polymers.

Sebastiaan Huber describes AiiDA, an open source system to manage complex workflows and heterogeneous data.

Sujung Kim describes how to use the time-resolved magneto-optic Kerr effect to probe magnon–phonon interactions.