Xuyang Zhou, Yang Bai, Ayman A. El-Zoka, Se-Ho Kim, Yan Ma, Christian H. Liebscher, Baptiste Gault, Jaber R. Mianroodi, Gerhard Dehm, and Dierk Raabe
Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 168001 (2023) – Published 19 April, 2023
The Physical Review Journals want to be a home for chemists. It is our aim to publish work on electrochemistry and energy science (batteries, supercapacitors, and photocatalysis), nanoparticles and nanotechnology, metrology for analytical chemistry, and quantum information science for computational chemistry.
This retrospective Collection brings together influential research previously published across the portfolio. These papers, selected by our editors for their contribution to the field, have all undergone our standard peer-review process.
Researchers have investigated how pores in a solid change its chemical reactions with other materials. The result could make steel production more environmentally friendly.
The observation of 25 newly identified collisional resonances in a mixture of NaLi molecules and Na atoms offers new insight into the microscopic mechanism of resonant couplings.
Machine learning-assisted metadynamics is used to study water autoionization, one of the most important properties of water for all biological and chemical process including electrolysis (related to batteries).
Ordered nanostructures arising from block copolymer self-assembly, such as three-dimensional bicontinuous network phases with percolating and interpenetrating microdomain structures, are attractive in thin films for photonic crystals, optical metamaterials, size-selective separation membranes, and components in hybrid solar cells. This study describes the thin-film self-assembly behavior of a diblock copolymer, which undergoes melt-self-assembly in the bulk into a double gyroid (DG) network phase. The authors discovered film-thickness-dependent formation of topographical terraces, including islands, holes, and bicontinuous features. The occurrence of these terraces sensitively depends on the incommensurability of the as-prepared film thickness with the (211)-interplanar spacing of the DG unit cell.
Using lab-based operando X-ray and post-mortem techniques, researchers visualize the origins of electrochemical capacity fade under high-voltage conditions in pilot line single-crystalline LiNiMnCoO-graphite cells.
Block copolymers spontaneously self-assemble into well-defined nanostructures, but the vast and ever-growing design space of these intriguing materials complicates studying and anticipating useful structure–property relationships a . This study reports a versatile and efficient strategy to accelerate materials discovery by building expansive and high-quality block copolymer libraries through a combination of controlled polymerization and automated chromatographic separation. The power of this method was highlighted through the rapid generation of over 300 distinct and well-defined samples, yielding comprehensive phase diagrams with exceptional compositional and structural resolution.
Compressive yielding of a colloidal gel induces a unique state, independent of strain history, suggesting the microstructures of gels possess an inherent ability to self-organize.
Fully autonomous discovery of new materials could rapidly accelerate the development of better batteries, solar cells, high-power electronics, and more. This Perspective highlights current limitations in the autonomous identification of truly new materials and identifies bottlenecks where attention should be focused.
