Related papers: Designing Disorder into Crystalline Materials
Via mechanisms not accessible at equilibrium, self-propelled particles can form phases with positional order, such as crystals, and with orientational order, such as polar flocks. However, the interplay between these two types of order…
Structural disorder results in multiple scattering in real photonic crystals, which have been widely used for applications and studied for fundamental interests. The interaction of light with such complex photonic media is expected to show…
The concept of the order parameter is extremely useful in physics. Here, I discuss extensions of this concept to cases when the order parameter is no longer a constant but fluctuates or oscillates in space and time. This allows one to…
Crystals and quasicrystals can be characterized by an order that is a purely geometric property of an instantaneous configuration, independent of particle dynamics or interactions. Glasses, on the other hand, are ostensibly amorphous…
Chemical disorder, originating from the mixed occupation of crystallographic sites by multiple elements, is widespread in alloys, ceramics, and compositionally complex materials, where short- and long-range orderings can strongly influence…
Architected materials achieve unique mechanical properties through precisely engineered microstructures that minimize material usage. However, a key challenge of low-density materials is balancing high stiffness with stable deformability up…
Structural coloration by Rayleigh scattering is widespread in nature and holds a prominent place in various art objects over a broad period of time. Beyond the common statement that Rayleigh scattering is the primary mechanism behind the…
Aleatory architectures explore new approaches and concepts at the intersection of granular materials research and architecture/structural engineering. It explicitly includes stochastic (re-) configuration of individual structural elements…
At the forefront of nanochemistry, there exists a research endeavor centered around intermetallic nanocrystals, which are unique in terms of long-range atomic ordering, well-defined stoichiometry, and controlled crystal structure. In…
Time crystals are many-body systems whose ground state spontaneously breaks time-translation symmetry and thus exhibits long-range spatiotemporal order and robust periodic motion. Using hydrodynamics, we have recently shown how an…
The underlying structural order that transcends the liquid, glass and crystalline states is identified using an efficient genetic algorithm (GA). GA identifies the most common energetically favorable packing motif in crystalline structures…
We explore polaronic quantum transport in three-dimensional models of disordered organic crystals with strong coupling between electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom. By studying the polaron dynamics in a static disorder environment,…
Using ultrashort laser pulses, it has become possible to probe the dynamics of long-range order in solids on microscopic timescales. In the conventional description of symmetry-broken phases within time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory, the…
Granular crystallisation is an important phenomenon whereby ordered packing structures form in granular matter under vibration. However, compared with the well-developed principles of crystallisation at the atomic scale, crystallisation in…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
Crystallization of the amorphous phases into metastable crystals plays a fundamental role in the formation of new matter, from geological to biological processes in nature to synthesis and development of new materials in the laboratory.…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
We construct a new order parameter from the normal modes of vibration, based on the consideration of energy equipartition, to quantify the structural heterogeneity in disordered solids. The order parameter exhibits strong spatial…
Crystallization represents the prime example of a disorder order transition. In realistic situations, however, container walls and impurities are frequently present and hence crystallization is heterogeneously seeded. Rarely the seeds are…
Time crystals are quantum systems which are able to reveal condensed matter behavior in the time domain. It is known that crystalization in time can be observed in a periodically driven many-body system when interactions between particles…