Related papers: Tuning electronic and phononic states with hidden …
Crystals are a state of matter characterised by periodic order. Yet crystalline materials can harbour disorder in many guises, such as non-repeating variations in composition, atom displacements, bonding arrangements, molecular…
Local positional disorder in soft, anharmonic materials has emerged as a central factor in shaping their electronic, vibrational, optical, and transport properties. Viewed mainly as a source of performance degradation, recent theoretical…
We find an order-disorder transition from crystals to disordered crystals for static packings of frictionless spheres. While the geometric indicators are mostly blind to the transition, disordered crystals already exhibit properties apart…
Phonon localization is a phenomenon that influences numerous material properties in condensed matter physics. Anderson localization brings rise to localized atomic-scale phonon interferences in disordered lattices with an influence limited…
In condensed matter systems, the atoms, electrons or spins can sometimes arrange themselves in ways that result in unexpected properties but that cannot be detected by conventional experimental probes. Several historical and contemporary…
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…
Understanding the role of disorder and the correlations that exist within it, is one of the defining challenges in contemporary materials science. However, there are few material systems, devoid of other complex interactions, which can be…
Although crystalline solids are characterized by their periodic structures, some are only periodic on average and deviate on a local scale. Distinct local orderings can exist with identical periodic structures making their differences…
Localized waves in disordered one-dimensional materials have been studied for decades, including white-noise and correlated disorder, as well as quasi-periodic disorder. How these wave phenomena relate to those in crystalline (periodic…
Order and disorder constitute two fundamental and opposite themes in condensed matter physics and materials science. Crystals are considered the epitome of order, characterised by long-range translational order. The discovery of…
Crystal structures play a vital role in determining materials properties. In Li-ion cathodes, the crystal structure defines the dimensionality and connectivity of interstitial sites, thus determining Li-ion diffusion kinetics. While a…
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…
Positional polymorphism in solids refers to locally disordered unit cells that, on average, reproduce the high-symmetry structures observed in diffraction experiments. Standard theories of electron-phonon interactions fail to describe the…
Structure-property relationships in ordered materials have long been a core principle in materials design. However, the intentional introduction of disorder into materials provides structural flexibility and thus access to material…
Materials with coupled or competing order parameters display highly tunable ground states, where subtle perturbations reveal distinct electronic and magnetic phases. These phases generally are underpinned by complex crystal structures, but…
In many materials, ordered phases and their order parameters are easily characterized by standard experimental methods. "Hidden order" refers to a phase transition in which an ordered state emerges without such an easily detectable order…
We review recent progress in applying information- and computation-theoretic measures to describe material structure that transcends previous methods based on exact geometric symmetries. We discuss the necessary theoretical background for…
Quasicrystals possess long-range order but lack the translational symmetry of crystalline solids. In solid state physics, periodicity is one of the fundamental properties that prescribes the electronic band structure in crystals. In the…
Photonic crystals are extremely sensitive to structural disorder even to the point of completely losing their functionalities. While on one side this can be detrimental for applications in traditional optical devices, on the other side, it…
Structural defects are ubiquitous in condensed matter, and not always a nuisance. For example, they underlie phenomena such as Anderson localization and hyperuniformity, and they are now being exploited to engineer novel materials. Here, we…