Following publication of the original article [1], the authors identified an error in Fig. 3b. The correct Fig. 3 is in this correction, and the original article has been corrected. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Windows are critically important components in building envelopes that have a significant effect on the integral energy budget. For energy saving, here we propose a novel design of hydrogel-glass which consists of a layer of hydrogel and a layer of normal glass. Compared with traditional glass, the hydrogel-glass possesses a higher level of visible light transmission, stronger near-infrared light blocking, and higher mid-infrared thermal emittance. With these properties, hydrogel-glass based windows can enhance indoor illumination and reduce the temperature, reducing energy use for both lighting and cooling. Energy savings ranging from 2.37 to 10.45 MJ/m2 per year can be achieved for typical school buildings located in different cities around the world according to our simulations. With broadband light management covering the visible and thermal infrared regions of the spectrum, hydrogel-glass shows great potential for application in energy-saving windows.

Formamidinium lead triiodide (FAPbI3) perovskite quantum dots (PQDs) show great advantages in photovoltaic applications due to their ideal bandgap energy, high stability and solution processability. The anti-solvent used for the post-treatment of FAPbI3 PQD solid films significantly affects the surface chemistry of the PQDs, and thus the vacancies caused by surface ligand removal inhibit the optoelectronic properties and stability of PQDs. Here, we study the effects of different anti-solvents with different polarities on FAPbI3 PQDs and select a series of organic molecules for surface passivation of PQDs. The results show that methyl acetate could effectively remove surface ligands from the PQD surface without destroying its crystal structure during the post-treatment. The benzamidine hydrochloride (PhFACl) applied as short ligands of PQDs during the post-treatment could fill the A-site and X-site vacancies of PQDs and thus improve the electronic coupling of PQDs. Finally, the PhFACl-based PQD solar cell (PQDSC) achieves a power conversion efficiency of 6.4%, compared to that of 4.63% for the conventional PQDSC. This work provides a reference for insights into the surface passivation of PQDs and the improvement in device performance of PQDSCs.

Color-changeable fibers can provide diverse functions for intelligent wearable devices such as novel information displays and human–machine interfaces when woven into fabric. This work develops a low-cost, effective, and scalable strategy to produce thermochromic fibers by wet spinning. Through a combination of different thermochromic microcapsules, flexible fibers with abundant and reversible color changes are obtained. These color changes can be clearly observed by the naked eye. It is also found that the fibers exhibit excellent color-changing stability even after 8000 thermal cycles. Moreover, the thermochromic fibers can be fabricated on a large scale and easily woven or implanted into various fabrics with good mechanical performance. Driven by their good mechanical and physical characteristics, applications of thermochromic fibers in dynamic colored display are demonstrated. Dynamic quick response (QR) code display and recognition are successfully realized with thermochromic fabrics. This work well confirms the potential applications of thermochromic fibers in smart textiles, wearable devices, flexible displays, and human–machine interfaces.

With the advancement of industrial internet of things (IIoT), wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs) have been widely introduced in modern healthcare systems to collect real-time medical data from patients, which is known as HealthIIoT. Considering the limited computing and storage capabilities of lightweight HealthIIoT devices, it is necessary to upload these data to remote cloud servers for storage and maintenance. However, there are still some serious security issues within outsourcing medical sensor data to the cloud. One of the most significant challenges is how to ensure the integrity of these data, which is a prerequisite for providing precise medical diagnosis and treatment. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel and efficient public auditing scheme, which is suitable for cloud-assisted HealthIIoT system. Specifically, to address the contradiction between the high real-time requirement of medical sensor data and the limited computing power of HealthIIoT devices, a new online/offline tag generation algorithm is designed to improve preprocessing efficiency; to protect medical data privacy, a secure hash function is employed to blind the data proof. We formally prove the security of the presented scheme, and evaluate the performance through detailed experimental comparisons with the state-of-the-art ones. The results show that the presented scheme can greatly improve the efficiency of tag generation, while achieving better auditing performance than previous schemes.

Water surface wave turbulence is one of the factors affecting the performances of underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems. In our research, a phase-conjugate beam was used to correct the beam distortion and enhance the communication performances when a system is subject to surface wave turbulence. The phase-conjugate beam was generated by a phase-conjugate mirror (PCM), and a turbulence generator was used to generate surface wave turbulence in the experiment. We calculated the beam centroid distribution and the results showed that the phase-conjugate beam had a better propagation performance than the distorted beam at the different water depths. The root mean square (RMS) of the beam centroid for the phase-conjugate beam was 11 times less than that for the distorted beam, which meant that the phase-conjugate beam could effectively correct the beam drift. We further investigated the scintillation index and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); the results showed that the phase-conjugate beam was able to reduce the scintillation and an obvious improvement in SNR could be obtained. This research has the potential to be applied in UWC.

The oriented two-dimensional porous nitrogen-doped carbon embedded with CoS2 and MoS2 nanosheets is a highly efficient bifunctional electrocatalyst. The hierarchical structure ensures fast mass transfer capacity in improving the electrocatalytic activity. And the greatly increased specific surface area is beneficial to expose more electrocatalytically active atoms. For oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) tests in 1 mol/L KOH solution, only 194 and 140 mV overpotential are required to achieve a current density of 10 mA/cm2, respectively. Our research provides an effective strategy for synergizing the individual components in nanostructures for a wide range of electrocatalytic reactions.

Large-scale trapped-ion quantum computers hold great promise to outperform classical computers and are crucially desirable for finance, pharmaceutical industry, fundamental chemistry and other fields. Currently, a big challenge for trapped-ion quantum computers is the poor scalability mainly brought by the optical elements that are used for optical addressing. Metasurfaces provide a promising solution due to their excellent flexibility and integration ability. Here, we propose and numerically demonstrate a scalable off-axis metalens array for optical addressing working at the wavelength of 350 nm. Metalens arrays designed for x linearly polarized and left circularly polarized light respectively can focus the collimated addressing beam array into a compact focused spot array with spot spacing of 5 μm, featuring crosstalk below 0.82%.

Selenium (Se) element is a promising light-harvesting material for solar cells because of the large absorption coefficient and prominent photoconductivity. However, the efficiency of Se solar cells has been stagnated for a long time owing to the suboptimal bandgap (> 1.8 eV) and the lack of a proper electron transport layer. In this work, we tune the bandgap of the absorber to the optimal value of Shockley–Queisser limit (1.36 eV) by alloying 30% Te with 70% Se. Simultaneously, ZnO electron transport layer is selected because of the proper band alignment, and the mild reaction at ZnO/Se0.7Te0.3 interface guarantees a good-quality heterojunction. Finally, a superior efficiency of 1.85% is achieved on ZnO/Se0.7Te0.3 solar cells.

In this paper, we present an edge detection scheme based on ghost imaging (GI) with a holistically-nested neural network. The so-called holistically-nested edge detection (HED) network is adopted to combine the fully convolutional neural network (CNN) with deep supervision to learn image edges effectively. Simulated data are used to train the HED network, and the unknown object’s edge information is reconstructed from the experimental data. The experiment results show that, when the compression ratio (CR) is 12.5%, this scheme can obtain a high-quality edge information with a sub-Nyquist sampling ratio and has a better performance than those using speckle-shifting GI (SSGI), compressed ghost edge imaging (CGEI) and subpixel-shifted GI (SPSGI). Indeed, the proposed scheme can have a good signal-to-noise ratio performance even if the sub-Nyquist sampling ratio is greater than 5.45%. Since the HED network is trained by numerical simulations before the experiment, this proposed method provides a promising way for achieving edge detection with small measurement times and low time cost.

Magnetic field sensing plays an important role in many fields of scientific research and engineering applications. Benefiting from the advantages of optical fibers, the optical fiber-based magnetic field sensors demonstrate characteristics of light weight, small size, remote controllability, reliable security, and wide dynamic ranges. This paper provides an overview of the basic principles, development, and applications of optical fiber magnetic field sensors. The sensing mechanisms of fiber grating, interferometric and evanescent field fiber are discussed in detail. Magnetic fluid materials, magneto-strictive materials, and magneto-optical materials used in optical fiber sensing systems are also introduced. The applications of optical fiber magnetic field sensors as current sensors, geomagnetic monitoring, and quasi-distributed magnetic sensors are presented. In addition, challenges and future development directions are analyzed.

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are one class of porous materials with permanent porosity and regular channels, and have a covalent bond structure. Due to their interesting characteristics, COFs have exhibited diverse potential applications in many fields. However, some applications require the frameworks to possess high structural stability, excellent crystallinity, and suitable pore size. COFs based on β-ketoenamine and imines are prepared through the irreversible enol-to-keto tautomerization. These materials have high crystallinity and exhibit high stability in boiling water, with strong resistance to acids and bases, resulting in various possible applications. In this review, we first summarize the preparation methods for COFs based on β-ketoenamine, in the form of powders, films and foams. Then, the effects of different synthetic methods on the crystallinity and pore structure of COFs based on β-ketoenamine are analyzed and compared. The relationship between structures and different applications including fluorescence sensors, energy storage, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, batteries and proton conduction are carefully summarized. Finally, the potential applications, large-scale industrial preparation and challenges in the future are presented.