Current Opinion in Solid State & Materials Science最新文献

Mucus is an essential barrier material that separates organisms from the outside world. This slippery material regulates the transport of nutrients, drugs, gases, and pathogens toward the cell surface. The surface of the cell itself is coated in a mucus-like barrier of glycoproteins and glycolipids. Mucin glycoproteins are the primary component of mucus and the epithelial glycocalyx. Aberrant mucin production is implicated in diverse disease states from cancer and inflammation to pre-term birth and infection. Biological mucins are inherently heterogenous in structure, which has challenged understanding their molecular functions as a barrier and as biochemically active proteins. Therefore, many synthetic materials have been developed as artificial mucins with precisely tunable structures. This review highlights advances in design and synthesis of artificial mucins and their application in biomedical studies of mucin chemistry, biology, and physics.

Cellulose nanocrystals are natural nanomaterials with a high aspect ratio, high specific area, excellent stability, and favorable optical performances. Cellulose nanocrystals can form cholesteric liquid crystals through a left-handed spiral arrangement. The suspension liquid of cellulose nanocrystals can retain the chiral cholesteric structure in the solid film after being completely dried, leading to the appearance of Bragg reflection and bright structural color in the visible spectrum. By changing the conditions or mixing with polymers, the cellulose nanocrystals film will show different structural colors due to the change of pitch. The film can cover almost the entire visible spectrum, which can be applied to various aspects such as sensing, anti-counterfeiting, detection, and so on. In this review, we elaborated on the synthesis and properties of cellulose nanocrystals materials and introduced the mechanism of structural color formation, as well as the current research progress and applications. Cellulose nanocrystals have become a hot spot in the field of structural color, and provide more research value for providing a cheap, easy-to-obtain, green-friendly, and high-biocompatibility natural photonic material.

The Glass Genome has only started to be explored. To advance the next generation design of glasses, both physics-informed and data-driven models must be widely available and understood. The most common difficulty in materials modeling is determining which are the simplest approaches appropriate for understanding and predicting key properties. The structure and properties of any material, including its thermodynamics and kinetics, originate from its underlying statistical mechanics. In this work, we present a tutorial view of statistical mechanical modeling of glass, covering structural predictions, structure-property relationships, and the complex kinetics of the glass-forming systems. While the approach presented herein is general and can be applied to any liquid or glassy system, we select calcium silicates as a specific example for this step-by-step review. We hope that this tutorial will be especially beneficial to those who are new to the modeling of glass-forming materials. A list of open questions related to the modeling techniques is also discussed.

The interaction between dislocations and point defects is key to deformation processes and microstructural evolution of structural materials. In this work, we compute the lifetime of point defects to describe their interaction with dislocations. This approach can accurately account for the effects of the dislocation core and anisotropic defect dynamics to accumulatively determine the capture efficiency, sink strength, and dislocation bias at different temperatures and dislocation densities. Particularly, the absorption of point defects by straight screw and edge dislocations in a model bcc iron system is studied. The maximum swelling rates based on the obtained bias factors are in close agreement with a variety of experimental measurements, including both neutron and ion-irradiation data, especially when considering the survival fraction for point defects from displacement cascades. This approach applies to many other processes and sinks, such as dislocation loops and interfaces, providing a powerful means to develop fundamental insights critical for improving radiation resistance and mechanical properties of structural materials through controlling defect interaction and evolution.

Piezo-/ferroelectric materials with high Curie temperature (T_C) are widely needed in sensors, actuators and transducers which can be used for high-temperature (HT) electromechanical transduction applications. In recent years, remarkable progress has been made in bismuth-based piezo-/ferroelectric perovskite materials (BPPs). In this article, recent progress in high T_C BPPs is reviewed. This review starts with an introduction to HT piezoelectrics and their applications. A detailed survey is then carried out on bismuth-based perovskites (BPs) with high T_C. Material synthesis, doping effects and chemical modifications of the related solid solutions are examined. Based on this analysis, the structure–property relationship of these materials is established. In addition, recent developments of BPPs for HT electromechanical transduction applications are presented and evaluated. Lastly, some main existing issues are analyzed and their possible solutions are proposed. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the research and development of BPPs and offers some prospects towards making these materials a viable resource for the design and fabrication of electromechanical transducers with unique specifications, especially, high temperature, high frequency and high power, for a wide range of technological applications.

Cancer drug response is heavily influenced by the extracellular matrix (ECM) environment. Despite a clear appreciation that the ECM influences cancer drug response and progression, a unified view of how, where, and when environment-mediated drug resistance contributes to cancer progression has not coalesced. Here, we survey some specific ways in which the ECM contributes to cancer resistance with a focus on how materials development can coincide with systems biology approaches to better understand and perturb this contribution. We argue that part of the reason that environment-mediated resistance remains a perplexing problem is our lack of a wholistic view of the entire range of environments and their impacts on cell behavior. We cover a series of recent experimental and computational tools that will aid exploration of ECM reactions space, and how they might be synergistically integrated.

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) and some complex alloys exhibit desirable properties and significant structural stability in harsh environments, including possible applications in advanced reactors. Energetic ion irradiation is often used as a surrogate for neutron irradiation; however, the impact of ion electronic energy deposition and dissipation is often neglected. Moreover, differences in recoil energy spectrum and density of cascade events on damage evolution must also be considered. In many chemically complex alloys, the mean free path of electrons is reduced significantly, thus their decreased thermal conductivity and slow dissipation of localized radiation energy can have noticeable effects on displacement cascade evolution that is greatly different from metals with high thermal conductivity. In this work, nanocrystalline HEAs of Ni₂₀Fe₂₀Co₂₀Cr₂₀Cu₂₀ and nonequiatomic (NiFeCoCr)₉₇Cu₃, both having much lower room-temperature thermal conductivity than pure Ni or Fe, are chosen as model HEAs to reveal the role that electronic energy loss during ion irradiation has in complex alloys. The response of nanocrystalline HEAs is investigated under irradiation at room temperature using MeV Ni and Au ions that have different ratios of electronic energy to damage energy, which is the energy dissipated in displacing atoms. Different from previously reported amorphization of nanocrystalline SiC, experimental results on these HEAs show that, similar to the process in nanocrystalline oxide materials, both inelastic thermal spikes via electron–phonon coupling and elastic thermal spikes via collisions among atomic nuclei contribute to the overall grain growth. The growth follows a power law dependence with the total deposited ion energy, and the derived value of the power-exponent suggests that the irradiation-induced instability at and near grain boundaries leads to local rapid atomic rearrangements and consequently grain growth. The high power-exponent value can be attributed to the sluggish diffusion and delayed defect evolution arising from the chemical complexity intrinsic to HEAs. This work calls attention to quantified fundamental understanding of radiation damage processes beyond that of simplified displacement events, especially in simulating neutron environments.

Solid-state Li-ion batteries employing a metallic lithium anode in conjunction with an inorganic solid electrolyte (ISE) are expected to offer superior energy density and cycle life. The realization of these metrics critically hinges on the simultaneous optimization of the ISE and the two electrode/electrolyte interfaces. In this Opinion article, we provide an overview of the materials and interfacial challenges that limit the performance of solid-state lithium metal batteries (SSLMBs). Owing to the importance of the Li/ISE interface, we dedicate a large section of this article to discuss the mechanistic aspects of lithium deposition at the Li/ISE interface. We further discuss a few recently proposed mechanisms that rationalize the growth of lithium through ISEs. We conclude our review with a brief discussion on the anode-free approach for fabricating SSLMBs where metallic lithium is generated in-situ from pre-lithiated cathodes.