From July 5 to 7, 2023, a leading researcher from the Laboratory of Computer Modeling of Electronic Structure of Solids, Dr. Phys. Dmitry Bocharov, attended the 4th International Symposium on Negative Thermal Expansion and Related Materials (ISNTE-4), held at the University of Padova, Italy, by special invitation of the organizers.
Conference topics covered all aspects of negative thermal expansion (NTE) and of the control of thermal expansion, such as NTE phenomena of phonon, electronic and magnetic origin; NTE materials (oxides, fluorides, metal-organic frameworks, intermetallics, organic molecular materials, polymers, metamaterials, etc.); different strategies for controlling the thermal expansion of materials and related applications; more in general, thermoresponsive materials.
A review of the series of studies on scandium fluoride conducted at the Institute of Solid State Physics over the past seven years has been of focus of interest to the participants of this highly specialized symposium; therefore, organizers invited ISSP UL scientists to participate.
Dmitry Bocharov gave an oral talk entitled "Exploring the Mechanisms of Negative Thermal Expansion in ScF3: A Combined Theoretical and Experimental Analysis" (D. Bocharov, I. Pudža, P. Žguns, S. Piskunov, Yu. Rafalskij, J. Timoshenko, A. Kalinko, A. Kuzmin, M. Krack, S.E. Ali, F. Rocca, A.V. Sorokin, J. Purans).
During the conference, new contacts were established with Igor Zaliznyak (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA), Soumya Mondal and Ayan Datta (Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, India), Götz Schuck (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie, Germany), and Alessandro Venier (University of Padua, Italy).
The 4th International Symposium on Negative Thermal Expansion and Related Materials (ISNTE-4) was the fourth in a series of International Symposia which aimed to bring together researchers from around the world interested in controlling and exploiting the properties of thermoresponsive materials.
