News & Views

A gold-surface-mediated doping strategy offers a solution to achieve spatially resolved chemical doping in organic semiconductors, enabling facile control for high-performance organic devices.

Ultrathin van der Waals metal oxyhalides act as robust hard masks for three-dimensional semiconductor processing. Their exceptional plasma resistance and unique plasma-induced smoothing enable high-aspect-ratio etching and precise nanopatterning of various materials.

Hubbard excitons capture the many-body correlations of Mott insulators. Using ultrafast light, their quantum wavefunction can be coherently rotated, opening a path towards optical quantum control and sensing in strongly correlated materials.

Hydrogels containing C=O groups and calcium cations show an unexpected paramagnetic effect that may have biomedical applications.

Friction typically scales with load but magnetic systems can defy this rule. Sliding arrays of magnetic rotors reveal that energy dissipation peaks where competing magnetic orders dynamically clash. This non-monotonic magnetic drag arises from sliding-induced hysteresis, offering a blueprint for tunable, contactless braking at any scale.

Both superfluorescence and amplified spontaneous emission are observed in giant perovskite nanocrystals with the transition between these two cooperative emission regimes worked out by tuning temperature, excitation fluence and emitter density.

Quadrupolar topological defects act as organization centres for material failure in a biomimetic active nematic solid.

A family of glassy materials emerges from local structural optimization, revealing an unexpected form of long-range orientational order.

A single monomer can be leveraged to generate polymeric materials with diverse structures or tunable properties and chemical recyclability.

A resonant inelastic X-ray scattering interferometric approach exposes a highly entangled electronic ground state in a pyrochlore iridate, linking quantum entanglement to intertwined symmetry-breaking orders in a correlated metal near a metal–insulator transition.

Time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy now resolves the long-sought avoided crossing in light-driven graphene, establishing a practical recipe for Floquet band engineering and sharpening prospects for light-induced topology in quantum materials.

Three-dimensional all-dielectric photonic topological insulators are experimentally shown to control far-field emission via the pseudo-spin degree of freedom.

Using multiple spectroscopies, it is shown that water oxidation on iridium oxides is driven by accumulated oxygen ligand holes.

Nanoscaled selectors made of elemental selenium that show picoampere-level leakage current and an on/off ratio of 10⁸ call for rethinking electrical transport mechanisms.

A sacrificial layer with hexagonal symmetry is reported that can be used to peel and delaminate oxide substrates with hexagonal symmetry and beyond.

Fitting the resistance fluctuation data with a hidden Markov model helps uncover the complex free energy landscape and understand the glass relaxation dynamics of a phase-change material, GeTe.

Highly dilute metal dopants arrest nanoparticle sintering by electronically stabilizing a few critical surface atoms, redefining how catalyst stability can be engineered at the atomic scale.

An advanced model is developed to pinpoint the parameters that control the bulk charge photogeneration yield and to provide design strategies for highly efficient organic solar cells.

A martensitic medium-entropy alloy surpasses the long-standing strength–ductility ceiling of conventional ultrahigh-strength steels. The strengthening without sacrificing ductility originates from Mo–B–C interface complexes that stabilize small-angle grain boundaries.

A charge transfer between metal oxide and halide perovskites occurring beneath the metal contact surface locally dopes the semiconductor, dramatically reducing contact resistance and enabling efficient low-voltage charge injection.