Nonmetallic material

Nonmetallic material, or in nontechnical terms a nonmetal, refers to materials which are not metals. Depending upon context it is used in slightly different ways. In everyday life it would be a generic term for those materials such as plastics, wood or ceramics which are not typical metals such as the iron alloys used in bridges. In some areas of chemistry, particularly the periodic table, it is used for just those chemical elements which are not metallic at standard temperature and pressure conditions. It is also sometimes used to describe broad classes of dopant atoms in materials. In general usage in science, it refers to materials which do not have electrons that can readily move around, more technically there are no available states at the Fermi energy, the equilibrium energy of electrons. For historical reasons there is a very different definition of metals in astronomy, with just hydrogen and helium as nonmetals. The term may also be used as a negative of the materials of interest such as in metallurgy or metalworking.

Variations in the environment, particularly temperature and pressure can change a nonmetal into a metal, and vica versa; this is always associated with some major change in the structure, a phase transition. Other external stimuli such as electric fields can also lead to a local nonmetal, for instance in certain semiconductor devices. There are also many physical phenomena which are only found in nonmetals such as piezoelectricity or flexoelectricity.