Materials Research Letters

Significant progress has been made in technologies to achieve extreme conditions, such as high pressure, high/low temperature, shock waves, high magnetic fields, interfacial strains, and quantum-confined systems. These technological advances are ushering in a new era of chemistry and materials discovery with exponentially more materials to be explored. Under extremes, new and counterintuitive chemical phenomena will be observed, such as unexpected chemical reactions and kinetics; and materials will display emergent and/or enhanced properties and functionalities that cannot be obtained using conventional methods.

However, challenges remain in controlling these extreme systems and characterizing them under extremes. In-situ and operando diagnostics based on both accelerator-based large-scale facilities and advanced in-laboratory instruments, are highly essential to investigate the changes of structure and property, as well as to develop a decisive understanding of the structure-property relationship and the underlying mechanisms for the emergent phenomena. With the development of extreme technologies and advanced diagnostics, numerous exciting opportunities are emerging for materials chemistry. To address the pressing challenges and difficulties, we envision this article collection highlighting recent findings, trends, and challenges in exploring new chemistry and materials under extreme conditions and cutting-edge characterization methods.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Chemistry and materials under high pressure;
• Emergent properties and functionalities under extreme conditions, the underlying mechanisms, and structure-property relationships;
• Epitaxial thin films with large strains and interfacial engineering;
• Quantum confined systems such as low dimensional electron systems;
• In-situ and operando characterizations under extreme conditions;
• Advanced characterization techniques based on synchrotron, neutron, and free-electron-laser facilities, as well as advanced in-laboratory instruments.

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisor for this collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member). Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is 15 October 2023.

Dr. Xujie Lü, Staff Scientist at the Center for High-Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research (HPSTAR), is working on functional materials and multidimensional tunings. Most notable among these are the optoelectronic materials, such as transition-metal oxides, transition-metal dichalcogenides, and metal halide perovskites.  By using state-of-the-art synchrotron-based and in-laboratory techniques, he studies these systems by examining their interactions with external stimuli, such as pressure, temperature, magnetic field, electromagnetic radiation, etc.  Dr. Lü has published 100 SCI papers with over 7,000 citations and an h-index of 43. He also serves as an editorial board member for Mater. Res. Lett.

Dr. Xiaofeng Guo is an associate professor of the Department of Chemistry and the Alexandra Navrotsky Institute for Experimental Thermodynamics at Washington State University. His current research interests are the thermodynamics of f-block condensed matter systems and their behaviours under extreme conditions. He has expertise in advanced high temperature calorimetry, synchrotron X-ray based scattering and absorption spectroscopy, and their applications in situ high-pressure and high-temperature studies.

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