Metal-based additive manufacturing, or three-dimensional (3D) printing, is a potentially disruptive technology across multiple industries, including the aerospace, biomedical and automotive industries. Building up metal components layer by layer increases design freedom and manufacturing flexibility, thereby enabling complex geometries, increased product customization and shorter time to market, while eliminating traditional economy-of-scale constraints. However, currently only a few alloys, the most relevant being AlSi10Mg, TiAl6V4, CoCr and Inconel 718, can be reliably printed; the vast majority of the more than 5,500 alloys in use today cannot be additively manufactured because the melting and solidification dynamics during the printing process lead to intolerable microstructures with large columnar grains and periodic cracks. Here we demonstrate that these issues can be resolved by introducing nanoparticles of nucleants that control solidification during additive manufacturing. We selected the nucleants on the basis of crystallographic information and assembled them onto 7075 and 6061 series aluminium alloy powders. After functionalization with the nucleants, we found that these high-strength aluminium alloys, which were previously incompatible with additive manufacturing, could be processed successfully using selective laser melting. Crack-free, equiaxed (that is, with grains roughly equal in length, width and height), fine-grained microstructures were achieved, resulting in material strengths comparable to that of wrought material. Our approach to metal-based additive manufacturing is applicable to a wide range of alloys and can be implemented using a range of additive machines. It thus provides a foundation for broad industrial applicability, including where electron-beam melting or directed-energy-deposition techniques are used instead of selective laser melting, and will enable additive manufacturing of other alloy systems, such as non-weldable nickel superalloys and intermetallics. Furthermore, this technology could be used in conventional processing such as in joining, casting and injection moulding, in which solidification cracking and hot tearing are also common issues.

Raman spectroscopy has capability for fingerprint molecular identification with high sensitivity if weak Raman scattering signal can be enhanced by several orders of magnitudes. Herein, we report a heterostructure-based surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) platform using 2D graphene oxide (GO) and 0D plasmonic gold nanostar (GNS), with capability of Raman enhancement factor (EF) in the range of ∼10 10 via light–matter and matter–matter interactions. The current manuscript reveals huge Raman enhancement for heterostructure materials occurring via both electromagnetic enhancement mechanism though plasmonic GNS nanoparticle (EF ∼10 7 ) and chemical enhancement mechanism through 2D-GO material (EF ∼10 2 ). Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation data and experimental investigation indicate that GNS allows light to be concentrated into nanoscale “hotspots” formed on the heterostructure surface, which significantly enhanced Raman efficiency via a plasmon–exciton light coupling process. Notably, we have shown that mixed-dimensional heterostructure-based SERS can be used for tracking of cancer-derived exosomes from triple-negative breast cancer and HER2(+) breast cancer with a limit of detection (LOD) of 3.8 × 10 2 exosomes/mL for TNBC-derived exosomes and 4.4 × 10 2 exosomes/mL for HER2(+) breast cancer-derived exosomes.

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Solar cells fabricated from sustainable quantum dot materials are currently not commercially available, but ongoing research provides a steady increase in efficiency and stability of laboratory devices. In this work, the first germanium quantum dot solar cell made with a gas aggregation nanoparticle source is presented. UV–vis spectroscopy reveals quantum confinement, and the spectral response of the germanium quantum dot Grätzel‐type solar cell confirms the presence of large and small band gap optical absorption due to a mix of particle sizes. Some of the particles are small enough to have substantial quantum confinement while others are so large that they have bulk‐like properties. The efficiency of the germanium quantum dot solar cells is very low but could reach 1% if the formation of germanium oxide layers is avoided in future experiments. This first quantum dot solar cell made with a gas aggregation nanoparticle source demonstrates, as a proof of concept, the technological potential for research and applications combining the fields of photovoltaics and gas aggregation nanoparticle sources.