Towards a Classification of the Effects of Disorder on Materials Properties

TL;DR

This paper discusses how disorder affects material properties, highlighting that sensitivity to imperfections can be both a challenge and an opportunity for discovering useful material behaviors.

Contribution

It provides a partial classification of the causes behind the sensitivity of correlated electron materials to external perturbations and imperfections.

Findings

Sensitivity to disorder can indicate useful material properties.

Disorder effects vary across different correlated electron materials.

Classification helps in understanding and potentially exploiting disorder effects.

Abstract

Many 'interesting; correlated electron materials exhibit an unusual sensitivity of measured properties to external perturbations, and in particular to imperfections in the sample being measured. It is argued that in addition to its inconvenience, this sensitivity may indicated potentially useful properties. A partial classification of causes of such sensitivity is given.