Crystals are ubiquitous: most metals, for example, are crystalline. Known for the almost perfect organization of their atoms, crystals nonetheless always contain imperfections, which are called ...

Amorphous solids do not exhibit long-range order due to the disordered arrangement of atoms. They lack translational and rotational symmetry on a macroscopic scale and are therefore isotropic. As a ...

In a September 2020 essay in Nature Energy, three scientists posed several "grand challenges"—one of which was to find suitable materials for thermal energy storage devices that could be used in ...

A perfect crystal is a purely theoretical concept. Real-world crystals contain imperfections, also called defects. Some simple defects, such as vacancies, are always present in crystals at a ...