From crystals to glasses: a new unified theory for heat transport
(PHYSorg.com Chemistry)

Theoretical physicists from SISSA and the University of California at Davis have developed a new approach to heat transport in materials, which finally allows crystals, polycrystalline solids, alloys and glasses to be treated on the same solid footing. It opens the way to the numerical simulation of the thermal properties of a vast class of materials in important fields such as energy saving, conversion, scavenging, storage, heat dissipation, shielding and the planetary sciences, which have thus far dodged a proper computational treatment. The research has been published in Nature Communications.