Relation of vibrational excitations and thermal conductivity to elastic heterogeneities: from disordered solids to nanostructures

by Stefano Mossa (CEA Grenoble Interdisciplinary Research Institute of Grenoble (IRIG))

Thursday 24 Oct 2019, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Rasetti (Dipartimento di Fisica .- Ed. G. Marconi)

Glasses and complex crystals with defects show inhomogeneous mechanical response at the nanoscale, which does not conform to the macroscopic limit predictions. This property can be demonstrated to strongly influence vibrational and thermal properties of the materials, and could ultimately lie at the bottom of puzzling anomalous features like boson peak, Raleigh-like strong scattering, or temperature dependence of thermal conductivity.
I will discuss these issues putting them in perspective, also with reference to advanced experiments with X-Rays, and show how information of this nature can be exploited to engineer nanostructures, devising metamaterials with tailored functions.