As a new family of two-dimensional (2D) materials, MXene, with many attractive physicochemical properties, has attracted increasing attentions and been applied for various applications. Here, for the first time, ultrathin MXene membranes with thickness down to several tens of nanometers were developed for pervaporation desalination by stacking synthesized atomic-thin MXene nanosheets. Influence...

Ultrathin plasmonic metasurfaces have proven their ability to control and manipulate light at unprecedented levels, leading to exciting optical functionalities and applications. Although to date metasurfaces have mainly been investigated from an electromagnetic perspective, their ultrathin nature may also provide novel and useful mechanical properties. Here we propose a thin piezoelectric plasm...

Ferromagnetic two-dimensional (2D) ultrathin nanosheets hold great promise for next generation electronics. Ferromagnetic metal-free materials that usually possess only an s/p electronic configuration with weak spin-orbit coupling and a large spin relaxation time, would play an important role in constructing future spintronic devices. However, the absence of an intrinsic spin ordering structure...

Ferromagnetic two-dimensional (2D) ultrathin nanosheets hold great promise for next generation electronics. Ferromagnetic metal-free materials that usually possess only an s/p electronic configuration with weak spin–orbit coupling and a large spin relaxation time, would play an important role in constructing future spintronic devices. However, the absence of an intrinsic spin ordering structure...

Unusual mechanical properties of mechanical metamaterials are determined by their carefully designed and tightly controlled geometry at the macro- or nanoscale. We introduce a class of nanoscale mechanical metamaterials created by forming continuous corrugated plates out of ultrathin films. Using a periodic three-dimensional architecture characteristic of mechanical metamaterials, we fabricate ...

The automated tape-collecting ultramicrotome (ATUM) makes it possible to collect large numbers of ultrathin sections quickly-the equivalent of a petabyte of high resolution images each day. However, even high throughput image acquisition strategies generate images far more slowly (at present ~1 terabyte per day). We therefore developed WaferMapper, a software package that takes a multi-resoluti...

We report layer-resolved measurements of the unoccupied electronic structure of ultrathin MgO films grown on Ag(001). The metal-induced gap states at the metal/oxide interface, the oxide band gap, and a surface core exciton involving an image-potential state of the vacuum are revealed through resonant Auger spectroscopy of the Mg KL23L23 Auger transition. Our results demonstrate how to obtain n...

Ultrathin cobalt phosphate (CoHPO4 · 3H2O) nanosheets are successfully synthesized by a one pot hydrothermal method. Novel CoHPO4 · 3H2O ultrathin nanosheets are assembled for constructing the electrodes of supercapacitors. Benefiting from the nanostructures, the as-prepared electrode shows a specific capacitance of 413 F g(-1), and no obvious decay even after 3000 charge-discharge cycles. Such...

The plasma polymerization of NIPAAM and titanium isopropoxide monomers into responsive ultrathin films with responsive optical properties using plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition is reported. The composite ultrathin films possess a large window for potential changes in their refractive index from 1.60 to 1.95. We demonstrated that these polymer films exhibit fast (transition time below 2...

Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study hypervelocity impacts of an ultrathin flyer plate with a semi-infinite two-dimensional model diatomic molecular solid. We show that these hypervelocity impacts can produce a dissociative phase transition from a molecular to a close-packed solid in the target material. We also show that hypervelocity impacts of ultrathin plates can produce extensi...