Disorder Effects on Vibrational Transport in Energy Materials

Elif Ertekin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering Dept.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Disorder in the atomic configuration of a material refers to a lack of regular patterns or predictability in the atomic positions. If the degree of randomness is sufficiently large, one consequence of disorder is localization, which refers to the absence of waves in a disordered medium. The breakdown of the wave picture and the resulting localization of the  modes  can  have  strong  effects  on  the  electronic,  thermal,  magnetic,  and  other properties of materials. In this presentation, I will show some examples from our recent work illustrating the effects of different types of disorder on vibrational transport in energy materials. I will show how established and emerging computational tools can be used to understand the physics that emerges as disorder is introduced. Examples include: the effects of disorder in low-dimensional carbon based materials, hybrid-ordered disordered metamaterials formed by ion beam patterning of silicon, hybrid perovskites which exhibit a  dynamic  correlated  disorder,  and  diamond-like  semiconductors  of  interest  for thermoelectric applications.

Elif Ertekin received her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley, and then  did  post-doctoral  work  at  both  the  Berkeley  Nanoscience  and  Nanotechnology Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research is centered on the use  of  computational  methods  spanning  from  atomistic  first  principles  to  continuum mechanics  to  describe,  predict,  and  better  understand  material  properties.  She  has received the TMS Early Career Faculty Fellow Award, the NSF CAREER award, the Dean’s  Award  for  Excellence  in  Research  from  the  College  of  Engineering  at  the University of Illinois, and is currently a fellow of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.