We often think of minerals as perfectly ordered structures composed of a single building block: the unit cell. In reality, nature rarely forms perfectly ordered structures and compositional degrees of freedom are inherent to many mineral classes. The atomic structure of a material determines its physical properties, such as thermal expansion, stiffness and heat transport.
On the microscopic scale disorder yields differences in building blocks and in turn this flexibility in local atomic arrangements alters physical properties. We thrive to investigate how nature designs disorder into crystal structures and understand the relationship between different types of local order and physical properties.