Defects are ubiquitous in ceramic materials, and can fundamentally alter their physiochemical, optical, thermal, mechanical, and electronic properties as well as their coupling with each other. Many opportunities exist for defect engineering in ceramic materials to tune their properties—at not only the ground state but also excited states under external fields and stimuli—especially in a controlled manner. For example, active research in recent years has enabled defect/disorder to play a key role in oxide materials for energy storage and conversion systems. Nevertheless, harnessing functional defects in ceramics presents continuous important scientific and technological challenges to materials scientists and engineers. Advanced theoretical, simulation and experimental tools are urgently required to characterize, visualize, understand, predict, and control formation and evolution of defects and interactions between them. Yet these techniques are largely limited or in some cases unavailable at present.
To address the pressing needs and challenges, this symposium aims to highlight the most recent developments, applications, and breakthroughs in harnessing functional defects in a wide range of ceramic materials via bridging expertise on theoretical modeling/simulation, materials synthesis and processing, and advanced characterizations. Particular attention will be paid to high-throughput studies combining simulations and experiments, predictive modeling of defect physics and chemistry, and the synthesis, control, and advanced characterizations of functional defects in ceramic materials. This topic may also include novel architectures for studying defects, such as the use of epitaxial heterostructures. Also of interest are in-situ or operando monitoring of functional defect formation/migration/ordering, the interplay between defect responses in ionic lattices and their manipulation by external fields, the behavior of functional defects in extreme environments, and use of transformative imaging capabilities to probe defect-driven phenomena in-situ along with their dynamics.
This symposium will provide an interactive forum for scientists from various fields interested in defect engineering for both classical and emerging applications. Specific sessions will be organized based on scientific theme topics in order to foster cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies. We will also host sessions with a focus on recent methodological advances in studying point and extended defects in functional materials. We hope this symposium will benefit ceramists with various backgrounds, and will help encourage the implementation of predictive design, smart synthesis/control, and advanced characterization approaches to solve the urgent problems in this field.
Proposed sessions and topics of interest:
- Tailoring functional defects in nanostructures, heterostructures, and substrate-supported systems
- Defect-enabled/enhanced properties for (electro-)chemical, light-harvesting, thermal, mechanical, and electronic applications
- Characterizations, control, and applications of defect-induced emergent phenomena including phase transformations
- Advances in methodologies of theoretical techniques for predictive modeling of functional defects
- Multi-scale methods to study the role of extended defects on functionality
- Visualizing the generation and manipulation of defects dynamically in bulk, surface, interface, and grain boundary of functional ceramic materials
- Effects of extreme conditions on the nature and behavior of functional defects
- In-situ and operando characterizations of defects and defect transports in functional ceramic materials
- Structural diagnosis and quantitative analysis on defects from atomic to meso scale and their correlation with properties
- Principles of future development of defect engineering in energy materials
Symposium Organizers
- Hui (Claire) Xiong, Boise State University, USA; clairexiong@boisestate.edu
- Candace Chan, Arizona State University, USA
- Janelle Wharry, Purdue University, USA
- Munekazu Motoyama, Kyushu University, Japan
- Haixue Yan, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
- Bo Zhang, Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics & Chemistry of CAS, China
- Palani Balaya, National University of Singapore, Singapore
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