Colloquium: Structurally disordered solids: physics and applications, Speaker: D. A. Drabold, Ohio University

In this lecture, I discuss the science and applications of an old but resurgent class of materials: amorphous semiconductors and glasses. After a short review of disorder and its consequences to electronic states on a static lattice, I show that these materials are useful for thermal imaging applications, and I explain the underlying mechanism for this functionality. Next, I report some recent work on an amorphous form of graphene, and predict its structure, electronic and vibrational properties. Among other things, I show that the presence of disorder, of the kind seen in experiments, has serious consequences to the unique electronic properties of crystalline graphene.