Exploring porous glasses as a class of 3D hyperuniform optical materials

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Disordered materials, albeit occurring in countless forms in nature around us, always have been harder to research than perfectly ordered or even fully random materials due to the complexity of quantifying disorder. Only in recent years, the scientific community realized the potential of correlated disorder for many fields of nature. A particular type of exotic configurations within the wide parameter space of correlated disorder is called hyperuniform disorder. Hyperuniform disordered states is distinguished from other disordered states by suppressing density fluctuations in the limit of large length scales, a property that was previously thought to be distinctive to periodic structures. We have shown together with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), for the first time, scalable approaches for 2D nearly hyperuniform arrangements of nanodisks. An even greater challenge, and the goal of this proposal, is the scalable fabrication of 3D hyperuniform structures. Our approach is the tailored design of spinodal decomposition in porous glasses. Though there is a strong theoretical case for hyperuniformity in such spinodal structures, to the best of our knowledge, no direct experimental proof exists to date.