Design of crystal-like aperiodic solids with selective disorder-phonon coupling

Alistair R. Overy, Andrew B. Cairns, Matthew J. Cliffe, Arkadiy Simonov, Matthew G. Tucker, Andrew L. Goodwin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

55 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number10445
JournalNature Communications
Volume7
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 4 2016
Externally publishedYes

Funding

A.R.O., A.B.C., M.J.C., A.S. and A.L.G. gratefully acknowledge financial support from the EPSRC (Grant EP/G004528/2), the ERC (Grant 279705), from the Diamond Light Source to A.R.O., and from the Leverhulme Trust and Swiss National Science Foundation to A.S. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 641887 (Project Acronym: DEFNET-ETN). We are grateful to U. Waghmare (Bangalore), D.A. Keen (ISIS), W.J.K. Fletcher (Oxford) and J.A.M. Paddison (Georgia Tech.) for relevant discussions.

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