Recent experiments in the underdoped regime of the hole-doped cuprates have found evidence for an incommensurate charge density-wave state. We present an analysis of the charge ordering instabilities in a metal with antiferromagnetic correlations, where the electronic excitations are coupled to the fractionalized excitations of a quantum fluctuating antiferromagnet on the square lattice.

The technological appeal of multiferroics is the ability to control magnetism with electric field1-3. For devices to be useful, such control must be achieved at room temperature. The only single-phase multiferroicmaterial exhibiting unambiguousmagnetoelectric coupling at room temperature is BiFeO3 (refs 4 and 5). Its weak ferromagnetismarises fromthe canting of the antiferromagnetically aligned spins by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction6-9.

The nature of the pseudogap regime of cuprate superconductors at low hole density remains unresolved. It has a number of seemingly distinct experimental signatures: a suppression of the paramagnetic spin susceptibility at high temperatures, low-energy electronic excitations that extend over arcs in the Brillouin zone, X-ray detection of charge-density wave order at intermediate temperatures and quantum oscillations at high magnetic fields and low temperatures.

While the topological order in two dimensions has been studied extensively since the discovery of the integer and fractional quantum Hall systems, topological states in three spatial dimensions are much less understood. In this paper, we propose a general formalism for constructing a large class of threedimensional topological states by stacking layers of 2D topological states and introducing coupling between them.

Much interest in the superconducting proximity effect in three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators (TIs) has been driven by the potential to induce Majorana bound states at the interface. Most candidate materials for 3D TI, however, are bulk metals, with bulk states at the Fermi level coexisting with well-defined surface states exhibiting spin-momentum locking. In such topological metals, the proximity effect can differ qualitatively from that in TIs.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a disease that involves the erosion and structural weakening of articular cartilage. OA is characterized by the degradation of collagen and proteoglycans in the extracellular matrix (ECM), particularly at the articular surface by proteinases including matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) and a disintegrin and metalloproteinase with thrombospondin motifs (ADAMTSs).1 Degradation of collagen and proteoglycans is known to alter shear mechanical properties of cartilage, but study of this phenomenon has been focused on bulk tissue properties.

We report on the initial explorations of engineering atomically-thin semiconducting crystals into a new class of two-dimensional nanoelectromechanical systems (2D NEMS) that are attractive for realizing ultimately thin 2D transducers for embedding in both planar and curved systems. We describe the first resonant NEMS operating at radio frequencies (RF), based on MoS2, a hallmark of 2D semiconducting crystals derived from layered materials in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs).

We characterized wall slip of tridisperse linear 1,4-polybutadiene on a silicon wafer in a parallel plate shear cell and tracer particle velocimetry. Tridisperse mixtures of fixed weight-average molecular weight Mw and varying number-average molecular weight Mn were prepared from nearly monodisperse polybutadienes. Their steady state slip behavior was examined at shear rates over the range of ∼0.1-15 s-1. The results show that the slip behavior in the transition regime depends on Mn at constant Mw.

Optical trapping is a powerful single molecule technique used to study dynamic biomolecular events, especially those involving DNA and DNA-binding proteins. Current implementations usually involve only one of stretching, unzipping, or twisting DNA along one dimension. To expand the capabilities of optical trapping for more complex measurements would require a multidimensional technique that combines all of these manipulations in a single experiment.