Since their discovery in 1982, exotic materials known as quasicrystals have bedeviled physicists and chemists. Their atoms arrange themselves into chains of pentagons, decagons and other shapes to ...

For a long time, scientists associated crystal structures with an ordered arrangement of atoms in a repeating lattice-like pattern, believing it to be the most stable configuration. However, by the ...

Quasicrystals are a unique class of materials with considerable promise for practical applications because of their unusual properties. But progress toward realizing that commercial potential has been ...

Quasicrystals have a host of unusual physical properties. These intermediates between amorphous solids and regular crystalline materials can now be made to self-assemble from nanoparticles. Talapin ...

The rock came in a box labeled “khatyrkite.” It didn’t look like much, just a chunk less than a centimeter long with a whitish rind and studded with several dark metals. But when Paul Steinhardt got a ...

From a thermodynamics perspective, all systems, even the universe itself, are all driven by two aspects of their state—entropy and energy. Any closed system will simultaneously tend towards a minimum ...

Quasicrystals (QCs) are fascinating solid materials that exhibit an intriguing atomic arrangement. Unlike regular crystals, in which atomic arrangements have an ordered repeating pattern, QCs display ...

In normal crystals like salt or diamond, atoms are arranged in patterns that repeat over and over in a grid. However, imagine a crystal where atoms follow a set of rules, but never repeat—like a tiled ...

Until 1982, quasicrystals weren't just undiscovered, they were believed to be physically impossible. Mathematicians now offer a key proof in the study of quasicrystals. The work, which was 10 years in ...

A scientist whose work was so controversial he was ridiculed and asked to leave his research group has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Daniel Shechtman, 70, a researcher at Technion-Israel Institute ...

Healing process: This X-ray tomography visualization shows a top-down view of two quasicrystals as they start to meld together during cooling. (Courtesy: Shahani Group/University of Michigan) A new ...