The role of Extrinsic Disorder in the Phononic and Thermal Response of Multilayered Materials

In multilayered materials, while strong covalent bonding provides the stability of the sub-nanometric elementary units, the whole assembly is held together by weak van der Waals interactions. The individual building blocks hence maintain most of their intrinsic characteristics also when arranged together to form a crystalline solid. In principle, novel material properties can be thus tailored by controlling those of the elementary units. If it is true that this bottom-up strategy in the synthesis of new materials has been intensively followed since the '80s, it is also true that more recently a growing interest has been put on the comprehension of the role that extrinsic disorder can play in the performance of these materials, with applications that goes from quantum technologies to thermoelectricity. In this talk I will present different examples of how it is possible to tune the phononic and thermal properties of multilayered materials by including structural/chemical disorder.