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 form patterns that never quite repeat. These patterns seem to defy physical laws and intuition. How can atoms possibly “know” how to form elaborate nonrepeating arrangements without an advanced understanding of mathematics?
“Quasicrystals are one of those things that as a materials scientist, when you first learn about them, you’re like, ‘That’s crazy,’” said Wenhao Sun (opens a new tab), a materials scientist at the University of Michigan.
Recently, though, a spate of results has peeled back some of their secrets. In one study (opens a new tab), Sun and collaborators adapted a method for studying crystals to determine that at least some quasicrystals are thermodynamically stable — their atoms won’t settle into a lower-energy arrangement. This finding helps explain how and why quasicrystals form. A second study (opens a new tab) has yielded a new way to engineer quasicrystals and observe them in the process of forming. And a third research group has logged (opens a new tab) previously unknown properties of these unusual materials.
Historically, quasicrystals have been challenging to create and characterize.
“There’s no doubt that they have interesting properties,” said Sharon Glotzer (opens a new tab), a computational physicist who is also based at the University of Michigan but was not involved with this work. “But being able to make them in bulk, to scale them up, at an industrial level — [that] hasn’t felt possible, but I think that this will start to show us how to do it reproducibly.”
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