Reviews & Analysis

The rapid growth of the 2D MXene family is driven by the designer chemistry control of their composition and structure. This Review discusses how compositional diversity, atomic arrangement, defects and surface chemistry govern properties, design strategies and emerging applications across technologies.

Lewis basic additives have a central role in enhancing the efficiency and stability of perovskite light-emitting diodes. This Perspective examines how these additives interact with perovskite emitters and outlines molecular design principles to guide future additive development.

Nanocatalyst ‘nanozymes’ provide a versatile alternative to natural enzymes. Nanozymes can operate in conditions inimical to enzymes and can catalyse reactions that their natural analogues cannot. This Perspective discusses design principles, strengths, challenges and applications of nanozymes.

Conducting polymers and other organic conductors enable emerging applications in bioelectronics, neuromorphic computing, energy storage and thermoelectric devices. This Review examines their charge transport physics at high carrier densities, including how complex microstructure, electron–electron interactions and electron–dopant counterion interactions govern transport behaviour.

Exceptional points enable unique light–matter interactions in non-Hermitian systems. This Review surveys band, scattering and Jones exceptional points in engineered materials, highlighting emerging applications and phenomena including topological properties, dynamic control, braiding, wavefront shaping and special states.

Building scalable quantum technologies requires generating robust many-body entanglement in solid-state platforms. This Review highlights how engineered light–matter interactions, optical nonlinearities and coupling to nanophotonic structures enable coherent many-body entangled states that are resilient to disorder and decoherence.

Emerging applications, including artificial intelligence, are associated with increasing energy consumption, posing fundamental challenges to the long-term sustainability of current electronic devices. This Review discusses key metrics for energy efficiency and explores how the unique structural, electronic and polymorphic properties of van der Waals materials enable new device strategies.

Challenges in integrating on-board electronic control have long prevented microrobots from achieving complex autonomy at small scales, leaving applications dependent on simpler, externally controlled particles. This Review examines recent developments in scaling modular microrobots down towards cellular scales.

Sodium-ion batteries are promising low-cost alternatives to lithium-ion systems yet limited by underperforming anodes. This Review highlights advances and challenges in hard carbon and alloy-based anodes, outlining design strategies to boost capacity, stability and commercial viability of next-generation high-energy sodium-ion batteries.

Graphene nanoribbons synthesized via bottom–up methods show great promise for nanoelectronics and quantum technologies. This Review highlights their synthesis, properties and device geometries, showcasing quantum transport phenomena and outlining challenges for future technologies.

Point defects critically influence material properties and require accurate computational modelling for reliable predictions. This Perspective outlines best practices for defect simulations using supercell approaches, emphasizing methodological transparency, reproducibility and robust reporting to improve consistency and integration with experimental studies.

Haptic interfaces are shifting from rigid systems to deformable, skin-conforming formats enabled by advances in materials and structural design. This Review discusses progress in flexible haptic technologies, introduces performance metrics and outlines challenges for next-generation tactile feedback systems.

Nanoprinting is a powerful fabrication strategy for scalable, high-resolution optical metasurfaces made from a diverse range of materials. This Review surveys recent advances in printing precision, throughput and reconfigurable materials, highlighting the promise of nanoprinting for next-generation flat-optics manufacturing and advanced photonic systems.

Electrochemical CO₂ and CO reduction to multicarbon products is a promising low-carbon pathway, but industrial deployment requires catalyst and electrode manufacturing far beyond laboratory scales. This Perspective evaluates scalable catalyst–electrode integration and outlines a workflow from nanoparticle synthesis to roll-to-roll coating for gigawatt-scale electrolysis.

Broken and tailored symmetries have a fundamental role in wave phenomena and their applications. This Review surveys the recent progress in the domain of artificial phononic media with an emphasis on the role of symmetry breaking, in both space and time, for advanced wave phenomena.

The transition of perovskite solar cells from laboratory research to industrial-scale production creates an important opportunity to prioritize sustainability. This Review introduces a closed-loop framework, addressing material sourcing, fabrication methods, solvent design, lead-risk mitigation, recycling strategies and future directions.

The chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect offers a unique approach to control and manipulate electron spin properties. In this Review, we summarize how the CISS effect is being leveraged to improve efficiency in energy science technologies.

Potentiometric immunoassays using field-effect transistors offer ultrasensitive protein detection for point-of-care and early diagnostics. This Perspective introduces a framework distinguishing a double-layer regime active at nanomolar antigen concentrations and a ΔpH-enabled regime active at sub-femtomolar concentrations, and examines the potential underlying mechanisms.

Protein-based biomaterials are becoming increasingly prevalent in biomedical applications that treat and prevent disease. This Perspective examines the evolution of techniques used to build and design these protein-based biomaterials, including fibres, nanoparticles and hydrogels, and explores how the field will be impacted by the newest tools in de novo protein design.

The implementation of low-dimensional perovskite capping layers is a promising strategy for enhancing the performance of perovskite solar cells; however, their thermal stability and reproducibility remain inadequately understood. This Review examines these underlying challenges, emphasizing ligand design and fabrication techniques to achieve high-quality, high-purity capping layers.