Related papers: Designing Disorder into Crystalline Materials
Crystalline materials, such as metals and semiconductors, nearly always contain a special defect type called dislocation. This defect decisively determines many important material properties, e.g., strength, fracture toughness, or…
We provide a brief survey of quantum statistical characterisations of order, disorder and coherence in systems of many degrees of freedom. Here, order and coherence are described in terms of symmetry breakdown, while disorder is described…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
We explore possibility of tuning photonic crystal properties via order-disorder transition. We fabricated a photonic bandgap material consisting of a three-dimensional array of conducting magnetizable spheres. The spheres self-assemble into…
The crystal structure of a disordered form of Cr$_{1/3}$NbS$_2$ has been characterized using diffraction and inelastic scattering of synchrotron radiation. In contrast to the previously reported symmetry (P6$_3$22), the crystal can be…
So-called polar liquid crystals possess spontaneous long-range mutual orientation of their electric dipole moments, conferring bulk polarity to fluid phases of matter. The combination of polarity and fluidity leads to complex phase…
Impurities in crystalline materials introduce disorder into an otherwise ordered structure due to the formation of lattice defects and grain boundaries. The properties of the resulting polycrystal can differ remarkably from those of the…
Self-assembly of granular particles is of great interest in both applied and basic research. It is commonly observed that when randomly packed into a container, granular particles form disordered structures like glass. As the particles are…
Studies of nucleation generally focus on the properties of the critical cluster, but the presence of defects within the crystal lattice means that the population of nuclei necessarily evolve through a distribution of pre-critical clusters…
A part of the theory of dislocations in crystals is revised with the aim to fit it into the framework of the nonlinear theory of plasticity initially designed for amorphous glassy materials.
We use a random pinning procedure to investigate stable glassy states associated with large deviations of the activity in a model glass-former. We pin particles both from active (equilibrium) configurations and from stable (inactive) glassy…
The use of coherent wave phenomena to enhance device performance is a cornerstone of modern optics. In juxtaposition to (locally) periodic metasurfaces, their disordered counterparts exhibit an interplay of destructive and constructive…
We report a metadynamics simulation study of crystallization in a deep undercooled metallic glass-forming liquid by developing appropriate collective variables. Through a combined analysis of free energy surface (FES) and atomic-level…
In quenched disordered systems, the existence of ordering is generally believed to be only possible in the weak disorder regime (disregarding models of spin-glass type). In particular, sufficiently large random field is expected to prohibit…
Structural defects in a crystal are responsible for the "two length-scale" behavior, in which a sharp central peak is superimposed over a broad peak in critical diffuse X-ray scattering. We have previously measured the scaling behavior of…
Disorder is more the rule than the exception in natural and synthetic materials. Nonetheless, wave propagation within inhomogeneously disordered materials has received scant attention. We combine microwave experiments and theory to find the…
Crystals form regular and robust structures that under extreme conditions can melt and recrystallize into different arrangements in a process that is called crystal metamorphism. While crystals exist due to the breaking of a continuous…
Understanding material composition-structure-function relationships is of critical importance for the design and discovery of novel functional materials. While most such studies focus on individual materials, we conducted a global mapping…
A metamaterial formed by superconducting circuits or quantum dots can serve as active lasing medium when coupled to a microwave resonator. For these artificial atoms, in contrast to real atoms, variations in their parameters cannot be…
Why are materials with specific characteristics more abundant than others? This is a fundamental question in materials science and one that is traditionally difficult to tackle, given the vastness of compositional and configurational space.…