Order from disorder
Abstract
Our understanding of the atomic structure of materials relies on our ability to describe structural characteristics such as the short-range order (in the case of liquids or amorphous materials) or the periodicity inherent to crystalline materials. On page 825 of this issue, L. Wang et al. ( 1) challenge our understanding of the inherent disorder that can be present in a crystal by presenting evidence for a crystalline material composed of amorphous clusters. They show that C60 molecules from the crystalline solvated fullerene phase C60*m-xylene undergo an order-to-disorder transition under compression at ≈35 GPa but keep their translational symmetry. A material can still possess long-range order even though its fundamental building blocks are disordered.