Perspectives

Fatigue-induced failures remain a critical challenge to the performance and reliability of metals and alloys due to their inherently complex and unpredictable nature. This Perspective highlights emerging frontiers in fatigue research, including key mechanistic insights, material designs for improving fatigue resistance and advances in fabrication, characterization and modelling techniques.

Materials design and informatics have become increasingly prominent over the past several decades. Using the Materials Project as an example, this Perspective discusses how properties are calculated and curated, how this knowledge can be used for materials discovery, and the challenges in modelling complex material systems or managing software architecture.

Architected materials provide a pathway to achieve properties beyond those of monolithic materials. This Perspective discusses complex architecture designs and their fabrication, characterization and functions across length scales and timescales.

Anode-free batteries contain no active material at the negative electrode when manufactured, and this can enable them to have high energy density. This Perspective presents a critical overview of the mechanisms governing the behaviour of anode-free solid-state batteries and provides guidance to improve this type of battery.

Platforms that exhibit moiré patterns have the potential to tailor band structures and control electromagnetic and mechanical waves. This Perspective discusses the current state of the art, challenges and outlook within the realm of classical wave physics.

Metal–organic frameworks are a class of materials that have attracted researchers for over 25 years and have been proposed for many applications. This Perspective discusses critical topics in applied research for commercialization, and highlights challenges associated with product development.

Metal halide perovskite (MHP) materials could revolutionize photovoltaic (PV) technology but sustainability issues need to be considered. Here the authors outline how MHP-PV modules could scale a sustainable supply chain.

Molecular materials for computing progress intensively but the performance and reliability still lag behind. Here the authors assess the current state of computing with molecular-based materials and describe two issues as the basis of a new computing technology: continued exploration of molecular electronic properties and process development for on-chip integration.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials, despite their small thickness, can display chirality that enables prominent asymmetric optical, electrical transport, and magnetic properties. This Perspective discusses the intriguing physics enabled by the structural chirality and the possible ways to create and control chirality in 2D materials.

This Perspective provides an overview on the emergent field of colloidal robotics, discussing recent developments on colloidal and micrometre-sized particles that can perform functions such as sensing, communication, computation and motion.

The commercialization of electronic textile (e-textile) products requires balanced sustainability considerations. Here the authors propose an e-textile design framework involving repair, recycle, replacement and reduction that can unify environmental friendliness, market viability, supply-chain resilience and user experience quality.

It is imperative that sustainability issues are considered throughout the life cycle of modern organic electronic devices. Here McCulloch and colleagues evaluate the status of embedded carbon, options for more sustainable materials, and recycling solutions both during manufacturing and at the end of life in organic electronic products.

Nanoscale ferroelectric topological solitons, such as polar bubbles, polar bubble skyrmions and hopfions, have garnered immense interest due to their emergent properties. This Perspective discusses how these structures form, advances in their study and how they can enable new devices and physics.

The discovery of ferroelectric switching in ultrathin layers of hafnium dioxide has aroused significant interest for low-power non-volatile memory technologies. This Perspective discusses how lessons learned from hafnium dioxide-based ferroelectrics can be applied to other applications, and other binary oxides.

Colloidal nanocrystals can form into periodic superlattices exhibiting collective vibrations from the correlated motion of the nanocrystals. This Perspective discusses such collective vibrations and their as-of-yet untapped potential applications for phononic crystals, acoustic metamaterials and optomechanical systems.

Research on two-dimensional van der Waals ferroelectrics has witnessed an explosion over the past few years. This Perspective formulates a framework by which results can be analysed, reviews recent progress, discusses mechanisms and properties for applications, and outlines challenges to be addressed.

This Perspective reviews the complementary developments in synthetic biology and biomaterials and discusses how convergence of these two fields creates a promising design strategy for the fabrication of tailored living materials for medicine and biotechnology.

Molecular weaving is the entanglement of one-dimensional flexible molecules into higher-dimensional networks. This Perspective provides an overview of the progress so far, and discusses the future challenges and potentials of this field.

This Perspective discusses the interplay between magnetism and topology in condensed matter.

This Perspective discusses biological barriers that have limited clinical translation of cancer nanomedicines and elaborates on new directions for the field that capitalize on a deeper understanding of the nano–bio interface.