Chaotic Crystallography: How the physics of information reveals structural order in materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews how information theory and computation can be used to analyze material structures, especially disordered materials, providing new insights beyond traditional symmetry-based methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach applying information-theoretic measures to characterize structural order in materials, including disordered ones, expanding beyond classical crystallography.

Findings

New techniques detect and describe novel material properties.

Approach relates to traditional crystallography but offers new interpretations.

Focus on disordered materials often overlooked in previous studies.

Abstract

We review recent progress in applying information- and computation-theoretic measures to describe material structure that transcends previous methods based on exact geometric symmetries. We discuss the necessary theoretical background for this new toolset and show how the new techniques detect and describe novel material properties. We discuss how the approach relates to well known crystallographic practice and examine how it provides novel interpretations of familiar structures. Throughout, we concentrate on disordered materials that, while important, have received less attention both theoretically and experimentally than those with either periodic or aperiodic order.