The team, led by Prof. Chen Guohua, Chair Professor of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at HKUST, developed a cartilage-inspired polymer nanocoating that suppresses the degradation and wear of battery cathode materials where it begins: at the internal grain boundaries of individual cathode particles. The work, carried out with Dr. Liu Qiang, a Research Assistant Professor in the same department, and Dr. Liu Yutong, a postdoctoral fellow who began the research during her PhD at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, demonstrates that a coating only about fourteen nanometers thick can act as a dynamic shock absorber inside battery particles, holding capacity at exceptionally high levels after thousands of charge-discharge cycles.

The problem the coating addresses is known as intergranular cracking, and it is the central obstacle standing between laboratories and the commercial deployment of next-generation nickel-rich layered cathodes. These nickel-rich materials are attractive because they pack more energy into the same volume, which is exactly what manufacturers of electric vehicles and consumer electronics want. But during cycling, the lithium ions that shuttle in and out of the cathode cause repeated volume changes in the material. Those changes generate severe dynamic internal stress, and because layered cathode particles are polycrystalline aggregates built from many smaller primary particles, the stress concentrates along the boundaries between those grains. Cracks propagate, the electrical and ionic pathways inside the particle are severed, isolated fragments stop contributing to capacity, and the cathode degrades cycle by cycle.

The HKUST team’s solution came from an unlikely teacher: the human knee. Cartilage in human joints performs a remarkable mechanical function, deforming under load and dissipating external stress so that the brittle bones beneath it are protected from damage. Replicating that biological strategy at the nanoscale, the researchers designed a crosslinked shape-memory polymer with the chemical designation p(BA-V4D4). The material is engineered to balance two properties that normally pull against each other: deformability, which lets it absorb and redistribute mechanical stress, and strength, which keeps it from simply being squeezed out of the way. When placed between adjacent primary particles inside a cathode, the optimized copolymer behaves, in the team’s own description, like cartilage between bones.

Getting a polymer into the interior of a battery particle is not straightforward, and this is where the team’s process innovation matters as much as the material itself. The researchers used initiated Chemical Vapor Deposition, or iCVD, a gas-phase technique previously developed in Chen’s laboratory. In iCVD, monomer vapors are delivered to the substrate and polymerize in situ on its surface, requiring no liquid solvents. Because the reactants travel as vapor, they can penetrate spaces that liquid coatings cannot reach. In this work, the monomer vapor penetrated deep into the electrode’s secondary particles, reaching the vulnerable internal boundaries between primary particles through nanosized channels just ten to twenty nanometers wide and roughly four thousand nanometers deep, and polymerized there to form a resilient, highly uniform stress-absorbing layer roughly fourteen nanometers thick.

Dr. Liu Qiang, a co-corresponding author of the study, explained the mechanism in the university’s announcement. By deploying a shape-memory polymer as an adaptive stress dissipator, he said, the team can suppress intergranular cracking through a solid stress delocalization mechanism, and the polymer structure was engineered to achieve an optimal balance between deformability and strength. He credited the laboratory’s earlier CVD technology for enabling the coating to be integrated into grain boundaries through those incredibly narrow nanosized channels. Dr. Liu Yutong, a co-first author, added that traditional methods cannot penetrate the grain boundaries of cathode materials or allow researchers to tune the mechanical properties of the polymer easily, whereas the iCVD method transports reactants into those boundaries to form a protective coating via in-situ polymerization. She noted that the team has successfully applied the technology to nickel-rich NCM cathodes and to commercial LiFePO4 materials, demonstrating its universal applicability across different cathode chemistries.

The shape-memory character of the polymer is what elevates it beyond a passive binder. A conventional coating might cushion a particle once, but under the repeated cyclic loading of thousands of charge-discharge cycles, a passive layer would fatigue and fail. A shape-memory polymer, by contrast, can deform under stress and recover its configuration, delocalizing stress dynamically rather than merely absorbing a single impact. In effect, the coating converts the sharp, localized stress concentrations that would otherwise nucleate cracks into distributed, manageable deformation across the particle’s interior. That is precisely the role cartilage plays in a joint, and it is why the researchers describe their material as biomimetic rather than simply protective.

For Prof. Chen, the achievement is the culmination of a research thread that began two decades ago. He recalled that the idea of applying CVD polymer coatings to energy storage materials took shape during his sabbatical at MIT in 2005, where CVD polymers were being applied to pharmaceutical particles for controlled drug release. His laboratory has since been, in his words, the first to successfully apply the technology to lithium-ion battery materials, and it previously demonstrated that CVD can coat conductive polymers in research published in Nature Energy in 2019. The new p(BA-V4D4) work extends that platform to a broader range of functional polymeric materials, positioning iCVD as a general tool for engineering the mechanical environments inside energy storage devices rather than only their surfaces.

The implications reach beyond conventional liquid-electrolyte cells. Prof. Chen said the team is now exploring the application of the technology to solid-state batteries, where mechanical stress at interfaces is an even more acute problem and where the coating could help address critical challenges related to both high-energy density and safety. Solid-state designs replace the flammable liquid electrolyte of conventional cells with a solid medium, but maintaining stable contact and managing stress between rigid solid components remains one of the field’s hardest problems, making an adaptive stress-dissipating interlayer an appealing candidate. Meanwhile, the team is scaling up the iCVD process to produce coated cathode particles at the 1,000-kilogram scale, enough to manufacture large batteries for industrial applications spanning consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, a category of aircraft whose viability depends heavily on battery energy density and cycle life.

The research was a collaborative effort involving experts from universities and institutions across Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland, contributing materials synthesis, characterization, and data science. Co-first authors alongside Dr. Liu Yutong are Prof. Zuo Wenhua of Xiamen University and Dr. Wang Wei, a PhD graduate of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Key contributors include Dr. Yu Hailong and Prof. Huang Xuejie of the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Liu Xiang of Beihang University, Prof. Ruan Haihui and Dr. Lin Cong of PolyU, Dr. Zhang Kai of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Du Ke of Central South University, and Prof. Pan Feng of Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. The study, titled Dynamic delocalization of stress in brittle battery positive electrode active materials by shape-memory polymer nanocoating, was published in Nature Nanotechnology on 23 July 2026. If the scale-up succeeds, the humble engineering lesson embedded in human joints, that resilient, deformable layers protect brittle structures from repeated stress, may soon be running inside the batteries of phones, cars, and aircraft, quietly extending the working life of the devices that depend on them.

Subject of Research: A biomimetic shape-memory polymer nanocoating that suppresses intergranular cracking in lithium-ion battery cathode materials.

Article Title: HKUST develops novel cartilage-inspired polymer nanocoating to substantially extend battery lifespan

Article References: HKUST develops novel cartilage-inspired polymer nanocoating to substantially extend battery lifespan. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: lithium-ion batteries, cathode materials, nanocoating, shape-memory polymer, initiated chemical vapor deposition, nickel-rich cathodes, intergranular cracking, biomimetic materials, solid-state batteries, HKUST, Nature Nanotechnology, battery degradation

Stretchable displays have long been viewed as the next step beyond the foldable and rollable screens that now dominate headlines in consumer electronics. The appeal is obvious: a screen that can be pulled, twisted, and conformed to curved surfaces would open the door to wearable devices that wrap around wrists, arms, or even organs, and to electronic skin that could display information directly on the body. Yet the field has been haunted by a fundamental design compromise. In most conventional stretchable display architectures, only the electrical wiring, known as the interconnects, is engineered to stretch. The light-emitting regions themselves remain rigid and fixed in place. When the display is stretched, those emitting regions spread apart like islands on a widening sea, and the fraction of the display area that actually produces light shrinks dramatically. The result is a screen that looks increasingly sparse, dim, and washed out the moment it is deformed.

To escape this trap, researchers around the world have pursued a more ambitious approach called intrinsic stretchability, in which the light-emitting pixels themselves behave like rubber bands, elongating along with the rest of the device rather than merely drifting apart. In principle, this keeps the emitting area constant and the image intact under strain. In practice, the approach has proven notoriously difficult. Soft, rubber-like light-emitting layers resist the kind of precise patterning that high-resolution displays demand, and conventional organic composite materials used in such devices have suffered from significantly reduced color reproduction and brightness. A stretchable screen that cannot produce vivid colors or adequate luminance is of little practical value, no matter how elastic it may be.

The joint team, led by Professor Jiwoong Yang of the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at DGIST in collaboration with a team led by Professor Moon Kee Choi of UNIST and a team led by Associate Director Dae-Hyeong Kim of the IBS Center for Nanoparticle Research, addressed these challenges with a new fabrication process the researchers call LIFT. The technique rests on a clever marriage of chemistry and mechanics. Quantum dots, which are light-emitting nanoparticles prized for their tunable colors and high efficiency, are chemically bonded to an elastic polymer that can stretch like rubber. The resulting composite is then transferred onto a surface as fine patterns in a process the team likens to stamping a seal, pressing precisely defined structures into place rather than trying to pattern the soft material directly.

A critical refinement came in the treatment of the light-emitting layer’s surface. The researchers applied a specialized surface treatment designed to improve both the electrical conductivity and the adhesion of the layer. This dual function matters because the two properties tend to pull in opposite directions in stretchable electronics: materials that conduct electricity well are often stiff and brittle, while soft, adhesive materials frequently conduct poorly. By engineering the surface and interface properties of the quantum dot composite, the team enabled precise pattern formation and excellent light-emitting performance at the same time, without sacrificing the stretchability of the material itself.

The performance numbers reported by the team are striking. Using the LIFT process, the researchers created ultra-high-resolution patterns with a pixel density of up to 16,000 pixels per inch, a figure that places the technology among the finest display patterning achievements ever reported and far beyond what the human eye can resolve at normal viewing distances. They also produced high-quality multicolor pixels using stretchable red, green, and blue light-emitting layers, the essential building blocks of full-color imagery. The completed device achieved a maximum brightness of 53,300 nits, a luminance level that dwarfs the previous ceiling of roughly 15,000 nits for stretchable light-emitting devices and represents the highest brightness reported for any device in this class. For context, that level of brightness is bright enough to remain clearly visible even in demanding ambient lighting conditions.

Equally important is how the device behaves under mechanical stress. The team reports that the display operated stably without mechanical damage or any degradation in image quality even when stretched to approximately 65 percent beyond its original length. In other words, a user could pull the screen substantially out of shape and the picture would remain as crisp and luminous as before, with the pixels themselves elongating gracefully rather than cracking or dimming. This combination of record brightness, extreme pixel density, and genuine mechanical resilience is what distinguishes the work from earlier demonstrations that managed one or two of these attributes but never all of them together.

Professor Yang emphasized the broader significance of the achievement in remarks accompanying the release. He noted that the study is highly significant because the team simultaneously achieved fine pixel fabrication and improved light-emitting performance by precisely controlling surfaces and interfaces while maintaining the stretchability of the quantum dot composites. He added that by successfully combining the chemical design of materials with precision fabrication technologies, the research will significantly expand the potential for the commercialization of next-generation stretchable displays. The statement underscores a theme that runs through the entire project: progress came not from a single breakthrough material but from the careful co-design of chemistry, surface engineering, and manufacturing technique.

The implications reach well beyond the laboratory. Wearable devices are converging on forms that hug the body, and electronic skin concepts for robotics, health monitoring, and prosthetics all require displays that can survive continuous deformation while delivering readable, colorful output. A stretchable QLED platform built on intrinsically elastic pixels could allow future devices to integrate screens into sleeves, patches, bandages, or garments without the visual penalties that plague current approaches. The record brightness also matters for outdoor and medical applications, where displays must compete with sunlight or penetrate through layers of material. While the path from a laboratory prototype to mass production always involves additional engineering hurdles, the demonstration of a complete, reproducible fabrication process rather than a one-off device gives the work a distinctly commercial orientation.

The research was supported by programs of the National Research Foundation of Korea, including the Global Young Connect and Mid-Career Researcher programs, reflecting sustained public investment in next-generation display science. The findings were published in Nature Nanotechnology under the title describing high-resolution intrinsically stretchable quantum-dot displays achieved through thermally assisted intaglio transfer printing, a name that captures the stamp-like transfer method at the heart of the LIFT process. As foldable phones give way to ever more ambitious form factors, this work suggests that the displays of the coming decade may not merely bend at a hinge but stretch across the curved surfaces of the human body itself, glowing brightly and sharply the entire time.

Subject of Research: Intrinsically stretchable high-resolution quantum dot display technology

Article Title: “Image quality remains intact even when stretched like a rubber band”: DGIST develops world’s brightest “stretchable quantum dot display”

Article References: “Image quality remains intact even when stretched like a rubber band”: DGIST develops world’s brightest “stretchable quantum dot display”. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: quantum dots, stretchable display, QLED, wearable devices, electronic skin, DGIST, Nature Nanotechnology, pixel density, luminance, transfer printing, flexible electronics, nanotechnology

Potential hysteresis is the gap between the voltage at which a battery charges and the lower voltage at which it discharges. Every rechargeable cell shows some of it, but in lithium-rich disordered rocksalt materials the gap can be pronounced, meaning that a substantial fraction of the electrical energy pumped into the battery during charging is never recovered during discharge. That lost energy is dissipated as heat, lowering round-trip energy efficiency and complicating thermal management. For a technology whose appeal rests on packing more energy into the same volume, a large and poorly understood hysteresis is a serious obstacle to commercialisation.

Cation-disordered rocksalt compounds, often abbreviated DRX, break with the ordered crystal structures that dominate today’s lithium-ion cathodes. Instead of arranging lithium and transition metal ions on neat, alternating planes, DRX materials scatter them almost randomly across the same lattice sites. The disorder is a feature, not a bug: it frees designers from the strict compositional rules of layered oxides and allows lithium-rich formulations that store charge both in transition metal redox reactions and in the oxidation of lattice oxygen itself, the so-called anionic redox that underpins their exceptional capacities.

Yet the same structural freedom that unlocks capacity also makes DRX cathodes notoriously difficult to understand. During battery operation the material evolves in complicated ways, and previous work has implicated transition metal migration, oxygen-oxygen bond formation, trapped molecular oxygen and ligand-to-metal charge transfer in the voltage hysteresis. Because so many processes overlap, the field has struggled to separate the thermodynamic contributions, which reflect genuine differences in the energy landscapes of charged and discharged states, from the kinetic contributions, which arise when lithium transport and structural relaxation lag behind the applied current.

The new study tackles this ambiguity by comparing two closely related model compounds, one containing niobium and one that does not, through an unusually broad suite of characterisation techniques. The team combined synchrotron X-ray absorption spectroscopy, X-ray pair distribution function analysis and neutron pair distribution function measurements to probe structure from the longest length scales down to individual atomic bonds, supplemented by scanning transmission electron microscopy to image nanoscale domains directly and by density functional theory calculations to interpret what the experiments revealed.

The central finding concerns the stereochemistry of d0 transition metals, ions such as niobium in its highest oxidation state whose d electron shells are empty. Decades of solid-state chemistry have shown that such ions tend to shift away from the centre of their octahedral oxygen coordination, an out-of-centre distortion driven by the pseudo Jahn-Teller effect, a vibronic instability in which low-lying electronic states couple to atomic displacements. In the niobium-containing compound, the researchers found that these distorted octahedra disrupt the cation short-range order that would otherwise develop in the nominally disordered lattice.

That disruption turns out to matter enormously for performance. Short-range order in DRX materials is a double-edged sword: it can stabilise the lattice, but it can also block the percolating network of face-sharing tetrahedral sites through which lithium ions must hop to move through the crystal. By breaking up ordered domains, the out-of-centre distortion of the niobium octahedra opens a more connected lithium percolation pathway, allowing charge and discharge to proceed more reversibly at high rates. In effect, a purely geometric quirk of empty d-shell ions acts as a kinetic lever on the whole electrode.

The pseudo Jahn-Teller effect also operates on the thermodynamic side of the hysteresis ledger. The team’s spectroscopic and computational results indicate that the distortion weakens the ligand-to-metal charge transfer process associated with the nickel-oxygen bonds, the electronic event that couples nickel redox to oxygen redox and has previously been linked to large voltage gaps. With that coupling softened, the oxidation and reduction of lattice oxygen become more reversible, so the energy stored in charged oxygen species is more faithfully returned on discharge. In the niobium-containing DRX electrode, both the kinetic and thermodynamic components of the potential hysteresis in lithium metal cells were effectively mitigated.

The significance of the work lies in its multiscale framing. Rather than attributing hysteresis to a single culprit, the researchers demonstrate that phenomena at very different length scales are entangled: an atomic displacement of a fraction of an angstrom remodels nanoscale chemical ordering, which in turn reshapes both the thermodynamics of oxygen redox and the kinetics of lithium transport. Disentangling these contributions required correlating electrochemical measurements with structural probes across scales, an approach the authors suggest should become standard practice for evaluating DRX chemistry.

For battery designers, the message is actionable. The choice of redox-inactive, d0 transition metals is not merely a way to tune capacity or stability; it is a stereochemical tool that can be used deliberately to sculpt local structure. Compounds engineered so that distorted octahedra suppress deleterious short-range order could deliver the high capacities of lithium-rich disordered rocksalt cathodes without the energy efficiency penalty that has held them back. As lithium metal anodes mature, pairing them with hysteresis-minimised DRX cathodes brings the industry a step closer to batteries that store more energy and waste less of it on every cycle.

Subject of Research: Stereochemical origins of voltage hysteresis in lithium-rich cation-disordered rocksalt battery cathodes

Article Title: Stereochemical origin of potential hysteresis in lithium metal batteries with lithium-rich cation-disordered rocksalt positive electrodes

Article References: Mei, Y., Xia, F., Chen, H., Li, Y., Gao, J., Zhu, K., He, L., Wu, S., Li, H.-F., Fan, L., Zhan, C., Ni, L., Wang, H., Jian, W., Wang, K., Silvester, D. S., Banks, C. E., Wu, J., Deng, W., … Ji, X. (2026). Stereochemical origin of potential hysteresis in lithium metal batteries with lithium-rich cation-disordered rocksalt positive electrodes. Nature Nanotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-026-02301-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41565-026-02301-2

Keywords: lithium metal batteries, cation-disordered rocksalt, voltage hysteresis, anionic redox, pseudo Jahn-Teller effect, short-range order, d0 transition metals, niobium, lithium percolation, cathode materials, energy efficiency, Nature Nanotechnology

The experiment is, at heart, a modern descendant of Henry Cavendish’s 1798 torsion balance, the apparatus he used to weigh the Earth. A torsion pendulum responds to a horizontal force by twisting a thin suspension fibre, and because the restoring torque of such a fibre can be made extraordinarily small, even minuscule forces produce measurable deflections. Cavendish-type balances remain among the most sensitive instruments for measuring gravity from small source masses, and they have been used to pin down the Newtonian gravitational constant and to test whether gravity behaves as expected at centimetre and sub-centimetre scales. The challenge the Shanghai-led team set out to solve is one of readout: how do you detect the nanometre-scale motion of a pendulum twisted by a gravitational pull of order 10^-16 newtons without adding noise, bulk or complexity?

Their answer is an optical microcavity coupled directly to the pendulum. The sensor uses a whispering-gallery-mode microresonator, a tiny optical resonator in which light circulates around the rim of a microsphere by continuous total internal reflection. Light is coupled into and out of the cavity through a tapered optical fibre whose tip is held roughly 100 nanometres from the microsphere surface. In this evanescent coupling regime, the amount of light that crosses the nanoscale gap depends exquisitely on its exact width. When the torsion pendulum moves, it changes the cavity-fibre separation, which in turn changes the optical transmission. The exponentially decaying evanescent field thus converts nanoscale displacements into optical signals across that roughly 100-nanometre coupling window, acting as an extremely steep mechanical-to-optical transducer.

The real innovation, however, lies in how the team manipulated the light inside the cavity. By exploiting coupled photon-phonon effects, in which the optical field interacts coherently with a mechanical acoustic mode of the resonator, they induced a regime known as Brillouin-scattering-induced transparency, an analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency familiar from atomic physics. Within this narrow spectral window, the optical dispersion becomes extremely steep, and the group velocity of light, the speed at which information-carrying pulses propagate, collapses to just 2,000 metres per second. That is roughly 150,000 times slower than light in vacuum, and it places the device firmly in the ‘stopped light’ regime that the same group has explored previously for light storage near exceptional points.

Why does slowing light help? The steep dispersion that accompanies stopped light means that a tiny change in the cavity resonance frequency, caused by a tiny displacement of the pendulum, produces a disproportionately large change in the phase and transmission of the probe light. In effect, the slow-light resonance amplifies the optical signature of small mechanical motion. This is conceptually similar to how optomechanically induced transparency and other cavity-enhanced readout schemes have boosted force sensitivity in micro- and nanomechanical resonators, but the stopped-light approach pushes the dispersion slope to an extreme, sharpening the transduction without requiring cryogenic temperatures or exotic materials. The whole readout chain operates at room temperature in a table-top apparatus.

The measured performance is impressive. The team reports a displacement sensitivity of 7.85 picometres per root hertz, meaning they can resolve pendulum motions of a few trillionths of a metre in a one-hertz measurement bandwidth. Converted through the mechanical response of the torsion pendulum, that corresponds to an acceleration sensitivity of 3.06 x 10^-16 g, where g is the standard acceleration due to Earth’s gravity. To put that in perspective, the sensor can detect accelerations roughly sixteen orders of magnitude smaller than the pull you feel standing on the ground. By periodically modulating the position of the source mass, a modulation technique that shifts the gravitational signal to a known frequency where technical noise is lower, the researchers resolved a minimum detectable change in gravitational force of 3.02 x 10^-16 newtons.

The source mass in these experiments was millimetre-scale, comparable to the masses used in the landmark 2021 Vienna experiment that first measured gravitational coupling between millimetre-sized gold spheres. That experiment demonstrated that gravity between small objects can be isolated; the new work shows how a photonic readout can be integrated with such a mechanical sensor to push sensitivity further while keeping the instrument compact. Integration has long been the sticking point for Cavendish-type balances: their optical levers and interferometric readouts are delicate, alignment-heavy and difficult to miniaturise. A microcavity readout, with light delivered through a fibre taper and the transduction happening in a micrometre-scale resonator, points toward on-chip gravitational sensing platforms.

The implications extend beyond metrology. Detecting the gravitational fields of microscopic objects is a prerequisite for microscale gravitational imaging, for constraining short-range deviations from Newtonian gravity, and for proposed tests of gravity’s quantum nature. Several theoretical proposals, including the influential 2017 Bose and Marletto-Vedral schemes, suggest that if two masses become entangled purely through their mutual gravitational interaction, gravity must be quantum-mechanical. Realising such experiments demands sensors that can resolve gravitational forces from ever-smaller masses held in ever-more-controlled quantum states. The acceleration sensitivity demonstrated here, combined with proposals for detecting single gravitons with quantum sensing and for gravitationally induced decoherence tests, suggests that stopped-light-enhanced readout could become a key enabling technology on that road.

There are, of course, practical hurdles between a table-top demonstration and a quantum-gravity laboratory. Torsion pendulums are inherently susceptible to thermal noise in the suspension fibre, seismic disturbances and Newtonian background forces from nearby objects, and the evanescent coupling gap of 100 nanometres demands nanometre-precision positioning stability. The researchers also note that the coupled photon-phonon physics that produces stopped light is the same physics that can introduce optomechanical backaction, so careful operating-point selection is needed to ensure that the dispersion enhancement is not eroded by the light’s own mechanical influence. Nonetheless, the demonstration that a room-temperature microcavity can transduce gravitational forces at the 10^-16-newton level marks a genuine advance in nanometrology.

What makes the result especially compelling is its elegance: rather than adding complexity, the team exploited a fundamental optical effect to make the sensor simultaneously simpler and more sensitive. Slow and stopped light has been celebrated for applications ranging from optical buffering to nonlinear enhancement, but using it as the readout engine of a gravitational sensor is a genuinely unexpected twist. If the approach can be scaled to smaller source masses, integrated with levitated or cryogenic mechanical systems, or combined with quantum state preparation of the pendulum itself, the humble Cavendish experiment may yet become a window into the deepest open question in physics: whether the force that holds the cosmos together plays by quantum rules at the smallest scales.

Subject of Research: Stopped-light-enhanced torsion-pendulum sensing of gravitational forces from millimetre-scale masses

Article Title: Stopped-light-enhanced gravitational force sensing

Article References: Zhu, Y., Geng, Q., Xue, B., Sun, Y., Zhang, R., Chen, X., Jiang, X., Azeem, F., Tierz, M., & Wan, W. (2026). Stopped-light-enhanced gravitational force sensing. Nature Nanotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-026-02298-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41565-026-02298-8

Keywords: gravity sensing, torsion pendulum, stopped light, optical microcavity, whispering gallery mode, cavity optomechanics, nanometrology, slow light, force sensitivity, quantum gravity, photon-phonon coupling, Nature Nanotechnology

The trick behind this new class of electronics is called sliding ferroelectricity, a phenomenon that emerged from the study of atomically thin layered crystals. In conventional ferroelectrics, such as the oxides used in some sensors and emerging memories, an electric field shifts charged atoms within the crystal lattice to flip the direction of an internal polarization. In sliding ferroelectrics, the polarization is instead controlled by nudging entire atomic layers sideways relative to one another. Because the layers are held together only by weak van der Waals forces, they can slide with remarkably little resistance, which means the switching can be extremely fast and should, in principle, endure billions of cycles without the lattice damage that gradually kills conventional ferroelectric devices.

Rhombohedral boron nitride is particularly attractive for this purpose. In its common hexagonal form, hBN, the atomic layers stack in an alternating pattern that cancels out any net polarization. In the rhombohedral form, rBN, the layers stack in a repeating ABC sequence, so that the small electric dipoles formed by each boron-nitrogen pair add up in the same direction, producing a vertical polarization that can be reversed by sliding the layers. The problem has been making rBN at all. The rhombohedral phase is thermodynamically less stable than the hexagonal phase, and earlier efforts produced only small crystals or films whose stacking order drifted between regions, which is fatal for devices that depend on a uniform polarization direction.

The research team, led by Kaihui Liu of Peking University along with colleagues at several Chinese institutions, solved this problem with what they call a step-templated interfacial epitaxy strategy. They began with sapphire wafers cut along the m-plane orientation, then annealed them so that the surface reorganized into a staircase of atomic-scale steps. Onto these stepped templates they sputtered films of a nickel-boron alloy. The surface steps of the alloy act as a template: as boron nitride crystallizes out of the film, the steps force the growing layers into a single, unidirectional ABC stacking order rather than the thermodynamically favored alternating arrangement. Control experiments showed the importance of this geometry, because films grown on step-free c-plane and a-plane sapphire templates yielded predominantly the ordinary hexagonal phase, while growth at elevated temperatures also pushed the material toward the wrong polymorph.

Comprehensive structural characterization confirmed the success of the approach. Electron backscatter diffraction and low-energy electron diffraction patterns collected at randomly selected positions across the wafers showed large-scale single crystallinity, and cross-sectional electron microscopy revealed the perfect ABC stacking order maintained throughout the film thickness. Second-harmonic generation, an optical technique sensitive to the symmetry of non-centrosymmetric crystals, produced signals roughly two thousand times stronger than those of a single layer, and intensity mappings across the wafers were uniform, indicating a consistent crystal configuration from edge to edge. Crucially for any future manufacturing effort, ten different batches of wafers grown under identical conditions showed congruent quality across spectroscopic and microscopic measurements, addressing the batch-to-batch variability that has plagued attempts to industrialize two-dimensional materials.

With the wafers in hand, the researchers built ferroelectric field-effect transistors, or FeFETs, in which the sliding polarization of the rBN layer gates a semiconductor channel and encodes memory as a shift in the transistor’s switching voltage. Measurements on rBN devices with graphene channels verified the intrinsic ferroelectricity, with polarization-electric field loops showing a remnant polarization of about 1.3 microcoulombs per square centimeter and clear switching current peaks, while identical devices built with ordinary hBN showed no such hysteresis, ruling out artifacts from the device architecture itself. Piezoresponse force microscopy confirmed that reversing the applied bias reversed the local polarization, and cross-sectional electron microscopy of oppositely poled regions captured the structural signature of the layer sliding.

The performance figures are striking. The devices switched at nanosecond speeds, survived more than two billion read-write cycles without degradation, and retained their state for timescales consistent with ten-year non-volatility. Even when the transistor channels were shrunk to an ultrashort length of thirty nanometers, the devices maintained large memory windows of four volts, a parameter that determines how reliably stored bits can be distinguished, and remained stable at temperatures above 470 kelvin. The films themselves proved to be excellent insulators, with a breakdown field of roughly ten megavolts per centimeter and minuscule off-state currents, properties that matter when billions of such devices must sit side by side without leaking charge into their neighbors.

Scaling from single devices to arrays is where most exotic memory concepts stumble, but the wafer format allowed the team to take that step. They constructed FeFET arrays across the rBN wafers using molybdenum disulfide channels, achieving high integration density with on/off current ratios of around one million, large enough for robust readout in dense circuits. The thickness of the rBN layer provided an additional design knob: thicker layers produced larger memory windows, with devices using 10.6-nanometer films showing windows of 1.7 volts and those using 40.3-nanometer films reaching 4.4 volts. That tunability, combined with the thermal robustness, suggests the material could serve not only as standalone non-volatile memory but also as the basis for artificial synapses in in-memory computing architectures, where the same devices that store weights also perform the multiply-and-accumulate operations that dominate neural network workloads.

What makes the result resonate beyond the laboratory is the manufacturing story. Two-dimensional materials have dazzled physicists for two decades, yet almost none have made the leap from millimeter-scale flakes to the four-inch, six-inch, and larger wafers that fabs require. By demonstrating batch production with consistent quality, the researchers have converted sliding ferroelectricity from a curiosity assembled under tweezers into a platform compatible with wafer-scale processing. The step-templated epitaxy itself is a generalizable idea, hinting that surface geometry can be used to stabilize other metastable stacking orders in layered materials, potentially unlocking ferroelectric versions of semiconductors and metals as well. Challenges certainly remain, including integration with existing silicon processes, contact engineering, and scaling the growth to larger substrates, but the combination of nanosecond switching, billion-cycle endurance, decade-long retention, and high-temperature stability in a wafer-scale format marks a genuine milestone. If the momentum continues, the humble boron nitride layer that once served only as a passive substrate may find itself at the active heart of the memory chips that power the next generation of artificial intelligence.

Subject of Research: Wafer-scale synthesis of single-crystal rhombohedral boron nitride for sliding ferroelectric memory devices

Article Title: Single-crystal rhombohedral boron nitride wafers for integrated sliding ferroelectric memory

Article References: Qi, J., Gu, T., Tu, J., Yang, Q., Guo, Q., Guo, L., Wu, P., Chen, L., Zhang, M., Zhao, C., Tian, E., Yang, Q., Xie, K., Yang, F., Song, B., Zhang, L., Zheng, X., Lu, X., Wang, E., … Liu, K. (2026). Single-crystal rhombohedral boron nitride wafers for integrated sliding ferroelectric memory. Nature Nanotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-026-02280-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41565-026-02280-4

Keywords: rhombohedral boron nitride, sliding ferroelectricity, two-dimensional materials, ferroelectric memory, FeFET, epitaxy, non-volatile memory, nanosecond switching, wafer-scale synthesis, in-memory computing, sapphire template, Nature Nanotechnology

The physics at the heart of the work stretches back to a landmark 1996 experiment, in which an ultrashort laser pulse was shown to demagnetize nickel on femtosecond timescales — far faster than any magnetic field pulse could. Subsequent discoveries revealed something even stranger: in certain ferrimagnetic alloys, a single pulse of circularly or even unpolarized light could deterministically reverse the magnetization entirely, toggling it from one stable state to its opposite. The most effective materials for this trick are synthetic ferrimagnets built from cobalt and gadolinium, in which two magnetic sublattices respond to the pulse’s sudden heat differently, driving the system through a transient state where exchange forces complete the reversal within picoseconds.

What has always limited the technology’s promise is integration. Optical fiber links and photonic integrated circuits already carry data across chips and between servers, but the magnetic memory elements that all-optical switching promised were still addressed with external lasers focused from above. To make the scheme practical, the writing mechanism had to live inside the same chip-scale platform that routes light in modern communications. The Eindhoven team, led by Pingzhi Li and Bert Koopmans, addressed this by fabricating a submicrometre magnetic memory element directly on top of a silicon nitride waveguide, so that femtosecond pulses traveling inside the guide could deposit their energy into the magnetic layer beneath — and flip it.

The device itself is an elegant piece of hybrid engineering. A low-loss silicon nitride waveguide, produced on a commercial photonics platform, carries trains of femtosecond pulses in its fundamental optical mode. Patterning a Co/Gd synthetic ferrimagnet directly atop the guide, the researchers shaped the magnetic layer into a Hall cross geometry narrower than one micrometre. This geometry is not arbitrary: the anomalous Hall effect, in which the voltage transverse to a current depends on the magnetization’s out-of-plane orientation, provides a purely electrical read-out. That means the state of the magnetic bit can be determined without any magneto-optical microscope, a crucial requirement for real integrated circuits where electrical addressing is the norm.

The results were striking. In the narrowest devices, with Hall crosses 500 nanometres wide, single-pulse, deterministic toggle switching was achieved — each incoming pulse flipped the magnetization to the opposite state, exactly as theory predicts for all-optical switching in a compensated ferrimagnet. The electrical read-out revealed a switching contrast of up to 90 percent, meaning nearly the full magnetic volume responded reliably to the guided pulse train. This is the first clear demonstration that light confined within a waveguide, rather than focused from free space, carries enough energy density to drive complete magnetic reversal in a device geometry compatible with photonic manufacturing.

Perhaps the most instructive finding came from scaling studies. When the researchers enlarged the Hall crosses, the switching contrast dropped and the reversal became stochastic — some pulses switched, some did not, and the reliability deteriorated with device size. Finite-element simulations of the optical absorption profile explained why: the guided mode deposits heat non-uniformly across the magnetic element, with the absorbed energy concentrated where the optical field intensity peaks. In a large device, only part of the magnetic volume reaches the energy threshold needed for reversal, leaving a partially switched region whose fate depends on how magnetic domain walls move and relax afterwards.

The authors attribute this behaviour, hypothetically, to domain-wall relaxation and thermally assisted pinning and depinning processes within the partially switched regions. After the femtosecond pulse triggers local demagnetization and subsequent reversal, the boundary between the switched and unswitched domains must sweep across the device for the toggle to complete. In small devices, that sweep happens quickly and reliably; in larger ones, domain walls encounter pinning landscapes and thermal fluctuations, and the outcome per pulse becomes a matter of chance. The lesson is unambiguous: device scaling is not an afterthought for on-chip all-optical switching — it is the critical design parameter that determines whether the switching is deterministic or erratic.

The significance of the work extends well beyond a single demonstration. Silicon nitride waveguides, of the TriPleX style used here, are a commercial low-loss platform already deployed in filters, sensors and telecommunications circuits. Combining them with magnetic memory elements opens a credible route to hybrid spintronic–photonic systems in which a single chip routes light for communication, computes optically where advantageous, and stores information in non-volatile magnetic bits written with femtosecond pulses. Because all-optical switching can occur on picosecond timescales with remarkably low pulse energies in optimized Co/Gd multilayers, the approach promises both ultrafast write speeds and the kind of energy efficiency that the semiconductor industry urgently seeks as electrical memory technologies approach their physical limits.

The application landscape is broad. Magnetic random-access memories based on spin-transfer or spin-orbit torque already occupy niches in embedded systems, but their write currents and speeds face trade-offs. Photonic writing sidesteps those constraints entirely, potentially enabling optical RAM architectures, in-memory computing accelerators, and neuromorphic spintronic devices in which light pulses act as both carriers and writers of information. The Eindhoven team’s demonstration that the writing mechanism works inside a standard photonic circuit — with electrical read-out built in — transforms what was a laboratory curiosity into an engineering platform with a clear scaling roadmap.

Challenges remain before magneto-photonic memories ship in products. The stochastic switching in larger devices must be understood and suppressed, whether through refined thermal engineering, materials optimization to lower the switching threshold, or deliberate control of domain-wall landscapes. Write speeds, endurance and integration density all need sustained attention. But the conceptual barrier has fallen: magnetization can now be switched entirely optically, on chip, with the light routed by the same waveguides that carry data. The era of fully integrated, ultrafast and energy-efficient spintronic–photonic information technology has moved from promise to platform, and the foundation stones have now been laid.

Subject of Research: On-chip all-optical switching of magnetization in integrated silicon nitride photonic circuits using femtosecond light pulses to write magnetic memory

Article Title: Demonstration of on-chip all-optical switching of magnetization in integrated photonics

Article References: Li, P., Simons, G. W. A., Zhang, T., Schrinner, P. P. J., Kamyar, S., Dekker, R., Leitao, D. C., Lavrijsen, R., Jiao, Y., & Koopmans, B. (2026). Demonstration of on-chip all-optical switching of magnetization in integrated photonics. Nature Nanotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-026-02281-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41565-026-02281-3

Keywords: all-optical switching, magnetization, integrated photonics, spintronics, silicon nitride waveguide, Co/Gd synthetic ferrimagnet, magnetic memory, anomalous Hall effect, femtosecond pulses, magneto-photonics, domain wall dynamics, Nature Nanotechnology

The study, led by Mingqian Zhang, Ziyi Li, Lei Liu and Hai-Chen Wu of the Institute of Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences together with colleagues, reconstitutes the complete catecholamine biosynthetic pathway in a test tube using purified enzymes and their required cofactors. The researchers then coupled this miniature chemical factory to an engineered protein nanopore — a nanoscale pore embedded in a membrane through which an ionic current flows. Whenever a metabolite from the pathway interacts with the pore, it briefly perturbs that current, producing an electrical fingerprint specific to that molecule. By reading these fingerprints as they accumulate, the team could follow the transformation of each intermediate into the next, second by second.

The technical heart of the work lies in how the researchers achieved specificity. Small molecules are notoriously difficult for nanopores to distinguish because they zip through the pore too quickly and too subtly to leave clean, separable signals. The team solved this by integrating two orthogonal molecular recognition modalities within a single nanopore platform. In essence, different chemical strategies were used to make different members of the pathway register at the pore: some metabolites, such as the catecholamines themselves, generate characteristic blockade patterns as they translocate, while the amino acids phenylalanine and tyrosine were detected through a tailored probe chemistry involving a copper-coordinated molecular adaptor and a cucurbituril host that captures the amino acid and presents it to the pore as a distinct complex.

With this dual recognition scheme in place, the researchers demonstrated highly specific detection of all six key players in the pathway: phenylalanine, tyrosine, levodopa, dopamine, noradrenaline and adrenaline. Extended data traces show characteristic current blockades and dwell-time distributions for each analyte at 100 micromolar concentration, recorded in a high-salt buffer at a transmembrane potential of +100 millivolts. Gaussian fits to the blockade histograms and single-exponential fits to the dwell times confirm that each metabolite produces a statistically distinct signature, which is the prerequisite for unambiguous identification in a mixed sample.

Having validated each molecule individually, the team turned to the full cascade. They initiated the enzymatic sequence and sampled the reaction mixture every five minutes, feeding each sample to the nanopore. The resulting single-channel recordings amount to a time-lapse film of neurotransmitter synthesis: phenylalanine signals fade as tyrosine rises, tyrosine gives way to levodopa, and levodopa is converted onward to dopamine, noradrenaline and finally adrenaline. Because the readout is label-free and single-molecule, nothing was added to the reaction to make it visible, and no amplification step could distort the quantitative picture of pathway dynamics.

This time-resolved view matters because the catecholamine pathway is not a simple conveyor belt. It is a branched network whose flux is governed by enzyme kinetics, cofactor availability and regulatory feedback, and disruption at any node is implicated in conditions ranging from Parkinson’s disease and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder to orthostatic hypotension and stress-related endocrine disorders. Conventional analytical methods — liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, electrochemistry, ELISAs — can measure metabolite concentrations at chosen endpoints, but they are generally snapshot techniques that require aliquots, labels or lengthy separation steps, making continuous, coupled monitoring of a multi-enzyme cascade cumbersome.

The platform also opened a window on pathology. A striking application involves iodotyrosine dehalogenase 1, or DEHAL1, an enzyme best known for recycling iodide in the thyroid, where it removes iodine from iodinated tyrosine residues. Defects in the DEHAL1 gene cause hypothyroidism, and 3-iodo-L-tyrosine, the substrate of this enzyme, has long been known to inhibit tyrosine hydroxylase, the rate-limiting enzyme that converts tyrosine to levodopa. The researchers used their nanopore assay to examine what happens to the catecholamine cascade when dehalogenase activity is compromised. They found that 6-methylisothiocyanate, a compound that disrupts the dehalogenase, perturbs catecholamine biosynthesis in a way that offers a mechanistic explanation for how DEHAL1 deficiency may compromise neurotransmitter production — potentially linking an inherited thyroid disorder to impaired catecholamine output.

Figure 5 of the study, titled ‘Effect of thyroiditis-like disorders on catecholamine metabolism,’ presents this perturbation experiment, with extended recordings showing how the cascade changes when monoiodotyrosine is present. The single-molecule records reveal shifts in the relative abundance of the pathway intermediates, illustrating the value of the method: rather than inferring a block from diminished end-product levels, researchers can see exactly where flux stalls and which intermediates accumulate. That level of mechanistic detail is precisely what drug developers and enzymologists need when trying to dissect regulatory nodes in metabolic networks.

Broader implications extend well beyond catecholamines. The authors describe their integrated enzymology-and-nanopore-sensing platform as a general framework for studying complex biochemical pathways with single-molecule resolution. Because protein nanopores can be engineered with different recognition elements, the same design philosophy could in principle be applied to other branched metabolic cascades, to drug-metabolism studies, or to screening enzyme inhibitors in real time. The approach builds on two decades of stochastic sensing, in which engineered pores have been taught to identify analytes as diverse as metal ions, nucleotides, amino acids, peptides, proteins and microRNAs, and it extends that lineage from static identification to dynamic pathway monitoring.

The team has deposited its source data publicly on Zenodo, and the paper — received in December 2025, accepted in August 2026 and published on 1 September 2026 — carries no reported competing interests. What the work ultimately delivers is a new kind of laboratory instrument: a single pore through which the chemistry of a neurotransmitter can be watched being born. If the framework generalizes as its authors hope, metabolic biochemists may soon spend far less time taking snapshots of pathways and far more time watching them move.

Subject of Research: Time-resolved single-molecule monitoring of catecholamine biosynthesis from phenylalanine using an engineered nanopore sensor

Article Title: Nanopore-enabled time-resolved monitoring of catecholamine-related phenylalanine metabolism

Article References: Zhang, M., Li, Z., Hao, W., Yi, Y., Zhou, K., Liu, L., & Wu, H.-C. (2026). Nanopore-enabled time-resolved monitoring of catecholamine-related phenylalanine metabolism. Nature Nanotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-026-02273-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41565-026-02273-3

Keywords: nanopore sensing, catecholamines, dopamine, adrenaline, phenylalanine metabolism, single-molecule detection, neurotransmitter biosynthesis, DEHAL1, iodotyrosine dehalogenase, label-free biosensing, Nature Nanotechnology, enzymology

Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, a research group led by Xun Hong of the University of Science and Technology of China and Yadong Li of Tsinghua University describes a catalyst in which isolated copper atoms are anchored to two-dimensional boron nanosheets. The material, designated Cu-SAs/B, features copper atoms coordinated by four boron atoms, forming what the authors call Cu–B4 sites. When used to catalyse the direct oxidation of methane with hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant, this apparently simple single-atom catalyst converted methane to acetic acid with a selectivity of 97 percent, a figure that places it among the most selective systems yet reported for this transformation. Equally striking was the activity: 221.3 millimoles of product per gram of copper per hour, achieved without any addition of carbon monoxide, which many earlier approaches to acetic acid synthesis had required as a co-reactant.

The significance of the selectivity number is difficult to overstate. In direct methane oxidation, the desired partial oxidation products are typically more reactive than methane itself, so catalysts tend to over-oxidize them to carbon dioxide or to produce a mixed soup of methanol, formaldehyde, formic acid and other species. Producing a single C2 oxygenate in near-quantitative selectivity means the catalyst is not merely activating methane but orchestrating a precise sequence of bond-breaking and bond-forming steps. The carbon–carbon coupling step in particular is the chemical bottleneck: it requires two different carbon-containing intermediates to meet on the surface in the right form, at the right time, and to join together before they are lost to side reactions.

The key discovery of the new study is how this catalyst manages that feat, and the answer challenges the conventional wisdom that single-atom catalysts and cluster catalysts represent separate, static design strategies. Using in situ X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy, the researchers watched the catalyst while it was actually working under methane oxidation conditions. What they saw was that the isolated copper atoms do not stay isolated. Under the reaction environment, and specifically in the presence of hydrogen peroxide, the copper atoms dynamically aggregate into Cu4 clusters, and when the reactive conditions are removed, they disperse back into single atoms. This reversible switching between two distinct nuclearity states happens repeatedly, meaning the catalyst is not a fixed structure at all but a dynamic ensemble that reshapes itself on demand.

Each of those two states turns out to carry a distinct job in the reaction mechanism. Through a combination of in situ spectroscopic techniques, including diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy, the researchers established that the CH3* intermediate, the methyl fragment that results from the initial activation of methane’s carbon–hydrogen bond, is formed on the copper single atoms, while the CHO* intermediate, the formyl species, forms on the Cu4 clusters. The carbon–carbon bond of the acetic acid product is then created by the coupling of these two complementary intermediates: a methyl unit contributed by the single-atom state and a formyl unit contributed by the cluster state. In effect, the catalyst divides the labour across its own two switchable configurations, so that a reaction requiring two incompatible surface chemistries can proceed on a single material.

This division of labour resolves a long-standing dilemma in catalyst design. Single-atom catalysts, in which every metal atom is individually anchored to a support, maximize atom efficiency and often excel at breaking strong bonds, but they lack the adjacent metal atoms needed to hold and combine larger carbon fragments. Metal clusters and nanoparticles, by contrast, provide ensembles of atoms capable of multi-site chemistry, but they waste material in their bulk and frequently promote unwanted deep oxidation. Conventional approaches force designers to choose one or the other. The switchable copper-on-boron system sidesteps the trade-off entirely, because the same pool of copper atoms reorganizes into whichever geometry each step of the reaction requires, and then restores itself to the dispersed state for the next catalytic cycle.

The choice of support was essential to making this dynamic behaviour possible. Boron nanosheets, a two-dimensional form of the light element boron first realized experimentally in 2016, provide a lattice in which copper atoms can be trapped in well-defined Cu–B4 coordination sites, yet from which they can still migrate and reassemble when the chemical environment changes. The researchers verified the atomic structure of the catalyst with aberration-corrected electron microscopy and X-ray absorption measurements, confirming the isolated dispersion of copper in the resting state, and then used operando X-ray absorption spectroscopy, including simulations of the X-ray absorption near-edge structure, to track the emergence of the Cu4 clusters during the reaction. Density functional theory calculations performed by the team supported the mechanistic picture, showing how the switching is triggered by peroxide and how the methyl and formyl intermediates form on their respective sites and couple to yield acetic acid.

The practical implications reach well beyond a single reaction. Methane is both a vast energy resource and a potent greenhouse gas, and flaring, venting and leakage of associated gas from remote oil fields waste enormous quantities of it every year. A technology that could convert stranded natural gas directly into liquid acetic acid, one of the world’s most widely produced commodity chemicals and itself a precursor to vinyl acetate monomer and acetic anhydride, would change the economics of gas utilization. Because the reported catalyst operates without carbon monoxide co-feed, it removes one of the major complications of earlier routes, and the use of hydrogen peroxide as oxidant suggests compatibility with relatively mild reaction conditions. The authors note that independent replication of the methane oxidation experiments by collaborators confirmed the catalytic results, an unusually rigorous check for a field where reproducibility has often been a source of controversy.

More broadly, the work establishes what the researchers call a proof of concept for switchable nanocatalysts as a design principle. Instead of freezing a catalyst into a single, optimized static structure, chemists may increasingly build materials whose active sites reconfigure themselves in response to the reaction environment, accessing transient geometries that cannot exist under ordinary conditions. The reversible single-atom to cluster transition observed here echoes related dynamic behaviour seen in other atomically dispersed metal systems, but the new study is among the first to show a switchable catalyst in which each configuration performs a specific mechanistic role in a multi-step industrial reaction. If the concept can be generalized to other metals, supports and transformations, the shape-shifting copper atoms on boron may mark the beginning of a new chapter in catalysis, one in which the most useful catalyst is not the most stable structure but the most adaptable one.

Subject of Research: Switchable single-atom copper catalysts on boron nanosheets for direct methane oxidation to acetic acid

Article Title: Switchable single-atom catalysts for highly selective C–C coupling in direct methane oxidation

Article References: Han, X., Cui, P., Wu, G., Cai, J., Wang, C., Sun, F., Qiao, P., Liu, X., Zhuang, J., Liu, H., Su, F., Wang, G., Yan, W., Qi, Z., Lin, Y., Hong, X., & Li, Y. (2026). Switchable single-atom catalysts for highly selective C–C coupling in direct methane oxidation. Nature Nanotechnology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-026-02271-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41565-026-02271-5

Keywords: methane oxidation, single-atom catalyst, copper, boron nanosheets, acetic acid, C–C coupling, Cu4 clusters, hydrogen peroxide, reversible switching, in situ XAFS, heterogeneous catalysis, Nature Nanotechnology