Metastable Materials: New Perspectives on Discovery

This lecture explores the challenges in identifying useful, experimentally realizable, and long-lived metastable materials. The instructor discusses the structure predictions and lifetime predictions, emphasizing the importance of understanding the factors that make certain structures more realizable. Various concepts such as the widths of attraction basins, ensemble probabilities, and ergodic systems are covered. The lecture also delves into the formal justifications behind partition functions and the ranking of metastable polymorphs based on ensemble probabilities. Additionally, the lecture presents a mapping algorithm for comparing different structures and discusses the implications of the findings on solid-solid phase transformation kinetics.