“Chemically-Disordered Transparent Conductive Perovskites With High Crystalline Fidelity,” a publication from July 2025 with strong contributions from Pat Keezer, gains attention this month. A graphical abstract artistically describing the work was used on the cover of volume 12, issue 42 of Advanced Science.
“A pulsed laser generates a high-energy plasma plume that quenches and kinetically arrests a high-symmetry, high-entropy, chemically disordered perovskite thin film on a substrate, yielding a material that is simultaneously conductive and transparent. This cover highlights the power of pulsed laser deposition and fast quenching to realize such phases with high crystalline fidelity.” See Advanced Science for more information.
Orignial Abstract: This manuscript presents a working model linking chemical disorder and transport properties in correlated-electron perovskites with high-entropy formulations and a framework to actively design them. This work demonstrates this new learning in epitaxial Srx(Ti,Cr,Nb,Mo,W)O3 thin films that exhibit exceptional crystalline fidelity despite a diverse chemical formulation where most B-site species are highly misfit with respect to valence and radius. X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy confirm a unique combination of chemical disorder and structural perfection in thin and thick epitaxial layers. This combination produces an optical transparency window that surpasses that of the constituent end-members in the UV and IR, while maintaining relatively low electrical resistivity. This work addresses the computational challenges of modeling such systems and investigate short-range ordering using cluster expansion. These results showcase that unusual d-metal combinations access an expanded property design space that is predictable using end-member characteristics and their interactions – though unavailable to them – thus offering performance advances in optical, high-frequency, spintronic, and quantum devices.
Read more at Advanced Science