For the second year running, a special collection of articles, that highlight the very best research published in the Journal of Physics, have been selected for their presentation of outstanding new research, valuable reviews of the field, the highest praise from international referees, and the highest number of downloads from the journal’s website.

The article 'A review and outlook for an anomaly of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM): superlattices on graphite' can be found here. Since its invention in 1981, scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is well-known for its supreme imaging resolution enabling one to observe atomic-scale structures, which has led to the flourishing of nanoscience. As successful as it is, there still remain phenomena which are observed using STM but are beyond our understanding. Graphite is one of the surfaces which have been most extensively studied using STM. However, there are a number of unusual properties of graphite surfaces. First reported in the 1980s, superlattices on graphite have since been observed many times and by many groups, but as yet our understanding of this phenomenon is quite limited.

The collection of articles contains 25 papers and topical reviews and provides a taste of the content published in the journal, the full list can be viewed at the Journal of Physics website.