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Perylene diimide-bithiophene macrocycles are electroactive and shape-persistent hosts. Here, the authors describe their self-assembly into a cellular organic semiconducting film whose voids are electrically sensitive to different guests, and which can function as the active layer in a field-effect transistor device.

Electric fields have been proposed as having a distinct ability to catalyse chemical reactions through stabilizing polar intermediates. Here, the authors show that electric fields can catalyse the cis-to-trans isomerization reactions of cumulenes in solution in a scanning tunnelling microscope

Singlet fission — the splitting of a singlet exciton into two triplets — is a process that could be exploited to improve the power conversion efficiency of solar cells. Spectroscopic data now suggest that coherent and incoherent mechanisms for singlet fission in crystalline hexacene coexist and occur on different timescales.

In heterostructures of the transition metal dichalcogenides MoS₂ and WSe₂, atomically thin p–n junctions are created that show gate-tunable rectifying and photovoltaic behaviour mediated by tunnelling-assisted interlayer recombination.

A ferromagnetic transition in CrSBr is attributed to ordering of magnetic defects, and can be electrostatically manipulated.

In atomic solids, substitutional doping is a powerful approach to modulating materials properties. Now, three substitutional mixtures of {Co₆Se₈} and {Cr₆Te₈} clusters in a crystal lattice with C₆₀ fullerenes have been prepared. At two Co:Cr mixing ratios, the solid solutions showed particularly high electrical conductivities and low activation barriers for electron transport, owing to their structural heterogeneity.

The charge-transfer characteristics of conjugated molecules are important in determining their electronic properties. Using resonant photoemission spectroscopy, Batraet al. quantify the through-space charge transfer in two model conjugated systems with femtosecond resolution.

DNA hybridization of two single-strands to form a double-stranded helix is widely used for genomic identification applications. Here, Vernicket al. record duplex formation of 20-mer oligonucleotide using a single-molecule field-effect transistor, where DNA kinetics is affected by electrostatic bias.

In organic photovoltaics, the best-performing devices are often based on fullerene derivatives as the electron acceptor counterpart. Here, the authors present new molecular electron acceptors with a helical structure and achieve 8.3% power conversion efficiency.

Electronic bandgap tuning in semiconductors enables key functionalities in solid-state devices. Here, the authors present a strategy to control the bandgap of atomically thin WS₂ and WSe₂semiconductors via manipulation of the surrounding dielectric environment rather than by modifications of the materials themselves.

Designing long and highly conducting molecular wires has been a great challenge for decades. It has now been shown that a singly oxidized 2.6-nm-long oligophenylene-bridged bis(triarylamine) can show a single-molecule junction conductance over 0.1G₀.

A two-dimensional crystalline polymer of C₆₀, termed graphullerene, is synthesized by chemical vapour transport, and mechanically exfoliated to produce molecularly thin flakes with clean interfaces for potential optoelectronic applications.

Pseudocapacitors exhibit charge-storage mechanisms leading to high-capacity and rapidly cycling devices. An organic system designed via molecular contortion is now shown to exhibit unprecedented electrochemical performance and stability.

The kinetics of DNA hybridization can be explored by measuring the conductance of a carbon nanotube that has a single strand of DNA covalently attached to a point defect.

Creating molecular components with controllable electronic properties is crucial to the realization of nanoscale devices. Now, a single-molecule conductance switch that operates through a stereoelectronic effect has been developed. The sub-ångström control of a scanning tunnelling microscope is used to switch reversibly between two distinct sets of rotational isomers, which differ greatly in their electronic character.

Highly insulating silicon-based molecules, engineered so that conduction is fully suppressed by σ quantum interference even for molecules less than a nanometre long, could prove useful in molecular-scale electronic circuitry.

Single-molecule electronic junctions comprise three components: anchors, electrodes and the molecular bridge. This Review surveys the relationship between the chemical structures and the electronic properties of each component, and extends the discussion to switching functions and the phenomenon of quantum interference.

This Review describes recent work where scanning probe techniques are used to effect the formation and cleavage of chemical bonds. We contextualize this progress in terms of single-molecule manipulation and summarize implications for synthetic chemistry and future studies.

Molecular clusters can be used as tuneable, superatomic building blocks to create new functional materials. This Review outlines the synthesis and assembly of superatoms into superatomic crystals and the resulting collective material properties.

In this Focus Review, we summarize our new strategy to create electroresponsive soft materials using electroresponsive dopants. Dopants can change the property of the LC material only with a minute amount and do not need to have an LC property by itself, allowing a simple molecular design. Based on this new concept, we developed cholesteric displays with rewritable color memory functions and quick color modulation functions. We also utilized this concept to create new columnar LC systems and realized multiresponsive columnar LC materials.