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Colourful liquid metals

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Liquid metals are promising multifunctional materials, but their single-colour physical appearance limits their applicability. There are several methods to endow liquid metals with colour and fluorescence, and although breakthroughs have been made in controlling their optical and interfacial properties, more work is needed to refine the synthetic strategies, better understand the coloration effects and enable the applications of colourful liquid metals.

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Fig. 1: Colourful liquid metals.

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Acknowledgements

Work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 91748206).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yunnan Key Laboratory for Micro/Nano Materials & Technology, International Joint Research Center for Optoelectronic and Energy Materials, School of Materials and Energy, Yunnan University, Kunming, China

    Liangfei Duan, Tong Zhou, Yumin Zhang, Jianhong Zhao, Jin Zhang & Qingju Liu

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Cryogenics and Beijing Key Laboratory of Cryo-Biomedical Engineering, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Qian Li & Jing Liu

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Jing Liu

Authors
  1. Liangfei Duan
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  2. Tong Zhou
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  3. Yumin Zhang
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  4. Jianhong Zhao
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  5. Jin Zhang
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  6. Qian Li
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  7. Jing Liu
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  8. Qingju Liu
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Correspondence to Jing Liu or Qingju Liu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Duan, L., Zhou, T., Zhang, Y. et al. Colourful liquid metals. Nat Rev Mater 7, 929–931 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-022-00512-2

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