The research activities of the Disordered Systems Group are focused on the study of the microscopic structural and dynamical properties of glasses, liquids, fluids and soft matter. In fact, the relevant macroscopic properties of disordered materials (e.g. thermodynamic properties, transport coefficients, elastic moduli etc.) cannot be still accurately predicted using a microscopic framework. Our research activities aim at achieving such a description in order to allow for a tailored design of materials with predefined properties. Our recent activities include:
- origin of dynamical heterogeneities in supercooled liquids;
- preparation of very stable and of very unstable glasses;
- liquid-like and gas-like properties of supercritical fluids;
- characterization of the stress field trapped in soft-matter during the preparation phase.
Our experimental activity combines standard laboratory tools to prepare and characterize the materials of interest with cutting-edge, X-ray based techniques to investigate the structure and dynamics of these systems. These techniques include: X-ray diffuse scattering, X-ray imaging, X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS), inelastic X-ray scattering (IXS), nuclear gamma-resonance time-domain interferometry (TDI).