A century has passed since the discovery of ferroelectricity in Rochelle salt. Since then, we have learned a great deal about the fascinating physics of ferroelectric materials. Based on the functionalities and switchable polarization that arise from them, we have developed a host of practical devices, such as ferroelectric random-access memory, actuators, transducers, infrared detectors, and electro-optic modulators.

In recent years, superconducting quantum computing has developed rapidly with the potential to scale to thousands of qubits in the next few years and explore practical applications of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices based on this. However, superconducting qubits have large sizes, and each qubit requires dedicated RF-control lines, making it increasingly challenging to integrate more qubits on a single chip as the number of qubits increases. Modularity offers a viable approach for scaling up to large numbers of qubits in the near term; however, this relies on very high-performance interconnects between the computing modules.

Interstellar space has numerous micro-scale dust. On the one hand, space dust is a potential threat to spacecraft; on the other hand, it plays a significant role in stellar evolution.

The transition-metal-catalysed cross-coupling reaction between an organo(pseudo)halide and a nucleophile is important in organic synthesis for carbon-carbon (C–C) and carbon-heteroatom (C–E, where E indicates p-block elements other than carbon) bond formations, in both industrial and academic settings (Fig. 1a).

Spin polarization is the basic concept of spintronics. In the last decade, the spin-orbital coupling effect in noncentrosymmetric crystal material-induced spin-momentum locking polarization, such as the Rashba effect, has promoted the development of a new generation of spintronics devices. While in the class of centrosymmetric material, the spin-orbital coupling effect cooperating with the local inversion symmetry breaking also induced the odd-spatially distributed spin polarization, named “Hidden Spin Polarization”, which has promised an expanded material pool for future spintronics. However, such an exotic hidden effect is difficult to be detected and thus be utilized for a device.

The impact of the direction of the chemical bond of colliding molecules on their chemical reactions has been observed in collisions of non-polar molecules for the first time. This observation and its theoretical underpinnings potentially offer a new way to control chemical reactions beyond the traditional chemical-reaction parameters of temperature, pressure, and the addition of catalysts.