This symposium will focus on the transport properties and behaviors of crystalline materials resulting from defect- and disorder-driven departures from a perfect lattice. Extrinsic disorder, both structural and chemical, can be harnessed as a tool for targeted engineering of material performance (e.g., doping in electronic materials and microstructure tailoring in thermoelectrics). However, it can also detrimentally affect function via the accumulation of defects during the out-of-equilibrium conditions in synthesis and operational environments including temperature gradients, stresses, and chemical activity. In semi-conducting and insulating materials, lattice disorder plays a defining role in a myriad of properties including optical behaviors and thermal transport. In metallic systems, the tradeoff between local chemical ordering and disordering ultimately determines the functional properties of chemically-complex and entropically-stabilized systems. In all cases, novel, advanced methods are rapidly evolving for synthesizing, characterizing, understanding, predicting, and designing disorder-driven performance. One section of this symposium will focus on the characterization of disorder-driven behaviors, particularly thermal performance, of materials subjected to conditions that generate extrinsic defects and chemical disorder. A second section will focus on advanced computational methods used to predict the functionality of disordered lattices, particularly those seeking to bridge microscopic ab initio- and meso-scales. A final, linking section will specifically target design works demonstrating successful integration of computation, synthesis, and characterization of systems which exploit engineered defects and disorder for novel function.

crystal growth defects electron-phonon interactions nanostructure optoelectronic radiation effects thermal conductivity thermoelectricity