As a result of the recent progress in fabricating large-area graphene sheets, graphene-based mechanical devices have become vastly easier to manufacture and now show even greater promise for a range of applications. This article reviews the progress of resonant graphene nanoelectromechanical systems and the possible applications of this technology to signal processing, sensing, and other areas.

X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) promise to revolutionize X-ray science with extremely high peak brilliances and femtosecond X-ray pulses. This will require novel detectors to fully realize the potential of these new sources. There are many current detector development projects aimed at the many challenges of meeting the XFEL requirements [1,2]. This paper describes a pixel array detector (PAD) that has been developed for the Coherent X-ray Imaging experiment at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Laboratory [3].

We present a combined study of the angle-resolved-photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and quantum Monte Carlo simulations to propose a novel polaronic metallic state in underdoped cuprates. An approximation scheme is proposed to represent underdoped cuprates away from 1/2 filling, replacing the many-body Hamiltonian by that of a single polaron with effective electron-phonon interaction (EPI), that successfully explains many puzzles such as a large momentum-dependent dichotomy between nodal and antinodal directions, and an unconventional doping dependence of ARPES in the underdoped region.

CHESS is a hard X-ray synchrotron radiation national facility located at Cornell University and funded by the National Science Foundation. It is open to all scientists by peer-reviewed proposal and serves 5001000 visitors each year. The CHESS scientific and technical staff develops forefront research tools and X-ray instrumentation and methods and supports 12 experimental stations delivering high intensity X-ray beams produced at 5.3 GeV and 250 mA.

DNA melting under torsion plays an important role in a wide variety of cellular processes. In the present Letter, we have investigated DNA melting at the single-molecule level using an angular optical trap. By directly measuring force, extension, torque, and angle of DNA, we determined the structural and elastic parameters of torsionally melted DNA. Our data reveal that under moderate forces, the melted DNA assumes a left-handed structure as opposed to an open bubble conformation and is highly torsionally compliant.

In this Rapid Communication we study finite-temperature properties of spin-1/2 interacting bosons with spin-orbit coupling in two dimensions. When the ground state has stripe order, we show that thermal fluctuations will first melt the stripe order and lead to a superfluid of boson pairs if the spin-orbit coupling is isotropic or nearly isotropic. Such a phase supports fractionalized quantum vortices. The Kosterlitz-Thouless transition from superfluid to normal state is driven by proliferation of half vortices.

The origin of pairing in a superconductor resides in the underlying normal state. In the cuprate high-temperature superconductor YBa2Cu 3Oy (YBCO), application of a magnetic field to suppress superconductivity reveals a ground state that appears to break the translational symmetry of the lattice, pointing to some density-wave order. Here we use a comparative study of thermoelectric transport in the cuprates YBCO and La 1.8-xEu0.2SrxCuO4(Eu-LSCO) to show that the two materials exhibit the same process of Fermi-surface reconstruction as a function of temperature and doping.

Static charge-density-wave (CDW) and spin-density-wave (SDW) order has been convincingly observed in La-based cuprates for some time. However, more recently it has been suggested by quantum oscillation, transport, and thermodynamic measurements that density-wave order is generic to underdoped cuprates and plays a significant role in YBa2Cu3O 6+δ (YBCO). We use resonant soft x-ray scattering at the Cu L and O K edges to search for evidence of density-wave order in ortho-II and ortho-VIII oxygen-ordered YBCO.

We explain that part of the reduction in the parameter uncertainties in the computations of Apgar et al. (Mol. Biosyst. 2010, 6, 1890-900) is due to a greatly increased number of effective data points. © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2011.

Graphene presents many distinctive optical properties that complement its attractive electronic and mechanical characteristics. We review some of the recent progress in understanding the electronic transitions and ultrafast dynamics in single and few-layer graphene crystals. © 2011 AOS.