Structural Complexity and Correlated Disorder in Materials Chemistry

Complexity is a measure of information content. Crystalline materials are not complex systems because their structures can be represented tersely using the language of crystallography. Disordered materials are also structurally simple if the disorder present is random: such systems can be described efficiently through statistical mechanics. True complexity emerges when structures are neither perfectly crystalline nor randomly disordered – a middle ground once named organised complexity''. In current parlance, in our field, we use the term correlated disorder’’ for this same regime, emphasising the presence and importance of non-random patterns.