Prof. Andrew Goodwin
University of Oxford

Thermodynamics demands that all materials are disordered at finite temperature. Sometimes disorder is random; more frequently it’s not. In our research group, we’re interested in cases where the deviations away from order, and away from randomness, are crucial for material function. This talk will describe some of the phenomenology of this so-called > "correlated" disorder: when and why it occurs [1], how we study it [2], how we might control it [3-5], and the implications it has for various materials properties [3,6].

[1] Simonov & Goodwin, Nat. Rev. Chem. 4, 657 (2021)
[2] Keen & Goodwin, Nature 521, 303 (2015)
[3] Simonov et al., Nature 578, 256 (2020)
[4] Nicholas et al., Nat. Chem. 16, 36 (2024)
[5] Meekel et al., Science 379, 357 (2023)
[6] Meekel et al., Nat. Mater. 23, 1245 (2024)