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

无序材料虽然以无数种形式存在于我们周围的自然界中，但由于无序量化的复杂性，它一直比完全有序甚至完全随机的材料更难研究。直到最近几年，科学界才意识到，在自然界的许多领域中，相关紊乱的潜力。在相关无序的宽参数空间内的一种特殊类型的奇异构型被称为超均匀无序。超均匀无序态与其他无序态的区别在于，在大长度尺度的极限上抑制密度波动，这一特性以前被认为是周期结构所特有的。我们与卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院（KIT）一起首次展示了二维纳米盘近乎超均匀排列的可扩展方法。一个更大的挑战，也是这个提议的目标，是3D超均匀结构的可扩展制造。我们的方法是在多孔玻璃中定制spinodal分解的设计。虽然有一个强有力的理论案例，在这样的spinodal结构的超均匀性，据我们所知，没有直接的实验证明存在。

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.