Over the five-year project period, major advances were made in nearly all targeted areas:
* Chemical control of correlated disorder was established through a landmark study of Prussian blue analogues (Nature, 2020), now considered a foundational paper in the field.
* In framework materials, new insights into multipolar order were gained across several families, leading to general rules for controlling symmetry-breaking processes. These insights were consolidated in highly cited review articles.
* A major unexpected discovery was a new class of disordered metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) whose connectivity reflects Truchet tiling motifs. This work, published in Science and Nature Materials, has reshaped understanding of disorder and its functional consequences.
* Techniques developed in the project—especially mean-field analysis, non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF), and hybrid reverse Monte Carlo (HRMC) methods—have broadened the toolkit for analysing diffuse scattering and are now used in both academia and industry (e.g. for pharmaceutical formulations).
* Structural complexity was shown to play an active role in functionality, including disorder-disorder transitions induced by host–guest interactions (Nature Chemistry, 2021), and hidden-order phases with analogies to long-established statistical mechanics models.
* The project also mapped structural degrees of freedom in layered materials to quaternion chain models, revealing analogues to spin-½ systems—offering a surprising classical lens on quantum phenomena.
Throughout, these findings were disseminated through over 60 publications, including 5 high-impact flagship papers, and have inspired a follow-on ERC Advanced Grant (TRUMAT) focused on chemically encoded complexity.
