Engineering of Functional Interfaces

Dear colleagues, As an annual tradition since 2009, physica status solidi A publishes a special section “Engineering of Functional Interfaces”. While interfaces have special complexities due to the lack of translational symmetry, they offer beautiful physics and enable a wide range of smart, high-tech applications. This calls for interdisciplinary research and development, in which physicists cooperate most often with chemists, biologists, metallurgists, engineers, and materials scientists. In parallel, functional interfaces play an increasing, often even decisive role in medicine, life and food sciences, as well as environmental monitoring in general. While the special section of 2022 is “thinner” than in previous years for many reasons, there is still a selection with six articles spanning several important aspects of functional interfaces from a fundamental to an applied perspective: At the side of the inorganic materials, the articles start with a novel concept to analyze layers of zinc on various substrates and even zinc itself using different isotope ratios (pssa.202200029). Then, we proceed with a contribution on enhancing the corrosion properties of cobalt-based alloys for hip implants (pssa.202200373), and an article on the memristive properties of anodic hafnium/tantalum oxides (pssa.202100751). Moving to organic–inorganic hybrid materials, there is a stimulating contribution on multilayered supercapacitors based on polyelectrolytes intercalated with graphene and metal oxides (pssa.202100871). In the “bio department,” we have one article on an impedance-based sensor for bacteria that reaches ultralow detection limits (pssa.202100405) and a contribution on a biocompatible as well as biodegradable glucose sensor for future implant applications (pssa.202200100). As guest editors of this special section, we wish all readers a pleasant overview on all these timely evolutions and there is more to come.