Imperial College London
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Dr Andrew Cairns

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Materials

Lecturer in Materials Chemistry
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 9528a.cairns Website

 
 
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Location

 

107Royal School of MinesSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Overy:2016:10.1038/ncomms10445,
author = {Overy, AR and Cairns, AB and Cliffe, MJ and Simonov, A and Tucker, MG and Goodwin, AL},
doi = {10.1038/ncomms10445},
journal = {Nature Communications},
title = {Design of crystal-like aperiodic solids with selective disorder–phonon coupling},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10445},
volume = {7},
year = {2016}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Functional materials design normally focuses on structurally ordered systems because disorder is considered detrimental to many functional properties. Here we challenge this paradigm by showing that particular types of strongly correlated disorder can give rise to useful characteristics that are inaccessible to ordered states. A judicious combination of low-symmetry building unit and high-symmetry topological template leads to aperiodic ‘procrystalline’ solids that harbour this type of disorder. We identify key classes of procrystalline states together with their characteristic diffraction behaviour, and establish mappings onto known and target materials. The strongly correlated disorder found in these systems is associated with specific sets of modulation periodicities distributed throughout the Brillouin zone. Lattice dynamical calculations reveal selective disorder-driven phonon broadening that resembles the poorly understood ‘waterfall’ effect observed in relaxor ferroelectrics. This property of procrystalline solids suggests a mechanism by which strongly correlated topological disorder might allow independently optimized thermal and electronic transport behaviour, such as required for high-performance thermoelectrics.</jats:p>
AU  - Overy,AR
AU  - Cairns,AB
AU  - Cliffe,MJ
AU  - Simonov,A
AU  - Tucker,MG
AU  - Goodwin,AL
DO  - 10.1038/ncomms10445
PY  - 2016///
TI  - Design of crystal-like aperiodic solids with selective disorder–phonon coupling
T2  - Nature Communications
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10445
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/56046
VL  - 7
ER  -
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