Beyond Imperfections: New Structure-Property Relationships in Ceramics and Glasses

788. WE-Heraeus-Seminar

22 May - 24 May 2023

Where:

Physikzentrum Bad Honnef

Scientific organizers:

Ass. Prof. Jens R. Stellhorn, U Nagoya/JP • Prof. Kyle Webber, U Erlangen-Nürnberg/DE • Prof. Hiroki Taniguchi, U Nagoya/JP

This seminar focuses on structures and functionalities of extended imperfections in crystals and glasses, aiming at providing an invaluable opportunity to share up-to-date experimental and theoretical findings about a new relationship between local, intermediate, and mesoscale structures as well as macroscopic properties.

Engineering of the local imperfections like defects, impurities, and microscopically ordered regions in crystals and glasses has so far been extensively carried out to impart additional functionalities to materials, for instance, conductivity in semiconductors and luminescence in
phosphors. Based on enormous experimental efforts and calculations, a fundamental understanding of local properties has been substantially developed. Recently, several exotic phenomena have been discovered in materials with microscopic heterogeneity, suggesting that the local imperfections sometimes give rise to unusual structural modulations around them in the cooperation with host matrices to induce singular functionalities, which cannot be obtained with the local imperfections nor the host matrices alone. Uncovering the hidden mechanisms behind such extended imperfections will update the fundamentals of solid-state physics and provide a new milestone for the development of novel functional materials.

Topics of this seminar range over materials synthesis and measurements, modelling, theoretical calculations, and data sciences. Moreover, we expect that structural analyses for crystals and glasses with the local imperfections having various functionalities, including
dielectric/magnetic/elastic responses and their cross correlations, superconductivity, and energy harvesting/storage properties are import topics. This seminar encourages international and interdisciplinary communications between early career and experienced researchers from a viewpoint of the extended imperfections. We hope that individual inspirations and mutual collaborations born in this seminar offer a new avenue for a next-generation materials science.


The conference language will be English. The Wilhelm and Else Heraeus-Foundation bears the cost of full-board accommodation for all participants.