Materials science articles from across Nature Portfolio

Layer-dependent magnetic behaviour is used to realize reconfigurable exchange bias in a 2D antiferromagnet.

A disorder-to-disorder synthesis strategy now enables the fast, wafer-scale growth of ultraclean monolayer amorphous carbon.

The chemistry at the lithium metal–electrolyte interface determines the cycling stability of lithium-metal electrodes but is challenging to control. A new study demonstrates that polymer coatings can both passivate the reactive lithium metal and selectively modulate interfacial electrolyte species, enabling stable cycling of high-energy-density pouch cells.

The restoration of Giacomo Balla’s Ritratto d’uomo / Eugenio Riva revealed the lasting impact of historical cleaning treatments on the painting’s surface. Using spectroscopy, imaging, and DNA analysis, the authors identified an onion-based residue from a mid-20th-century intervention and removed it through enzymatic cleaning, providing new strategies for the conservation of historical artworks.

Dou et al. report photo-induced long-lived polar states in octahedral copper-based hybrid perovskites with Jahn-Teller distortion. These states arise from reversible light-induced slow structural deformation induced by polar lattice microstrain formation.

Layer-dependent magnetic behaviour is used to realize reconfigurable exchange bias in a 2D antiferromagnet.

A disorder-to-disorder synthesis strategy now enables the fast, wafer-scale growth of ultraclean monolayer amorphous carbon.

The chemistry at the lithium metal–electrolyte interface determines the cycling stability of lithium-metal electrodes but is challenging to control. A new study demonstrates that polymer coatings can both passivate the reactive lithium metal and selectively modulate interfacial electrolyte species, enabling stable cycling of high-energy-density pouch cells.

Noise is a key source of decoherence that hinders the scaling of quantum computers. Suppressing disorder in epitaxially strained quantum wells in germanium/silicon germanium heterostructures reduces the noise experienced by hole spin qubits.

Guiding light is an essential task in optics, from optical fibres to compact nanoscale systems. Here, a few-atoms-thin MoTe₂ layer embedded into a planar waveguide emits photons into waveguide modes that propagate coherently, paving the way for waveguide quantum electrodynamics with van der Waals materials.

A low-temperature growth technique yields wafer-scale, nanometre-thin samples of amorphous noble metal selenides, unlocking opportunities to explore their intriguing properties and applications.