NANOSTRUCTURE · Solving the nanostructure problem: Understanding, exploiting and designing functional disordered materials

Many materials of fundamental importance possess structures that do not exhibit long-range periodicity. The absence of Bragg reflections in the diffraction patterns of these materials precludes the use of traditional crystallographic techniques as a means of determining their atomic-scale structures. Yet it is clear that these materials do possess well-defined local structure on the nanometre scale; moreover it is often this local structure that is implicated in the particular physical properties of interest. For this reason, the development of systematic information-based methodologies for the determination of local structure in disordered materials remains one of the key challenges in modern structural science; this is sometimes referred to as the “nanostructure problem”. This proposal addresses this issue by aiming (i) to develop robust methodologies for determining nano-scale structure in amorphous and highly-disordered systems, with an emphasis on laboratory-based techniques, (ii) then to use these techniques to develop structural models that will help address key scientific questions in a broad range of fields, and (iii) to apply the intuition gained to design new materials that exploit disorder to yield next-generation materials with desirable functionalities.