Quasicrystals are orderly structures that never repeat. Scientists just showed they can exist in space and time.

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 ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Fast forward 12 years later, and a team of physicists from France’s University of Paris-Saclay have ...

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 were first discovered by material scientist Dan Schechtman in 1984, but were initially seen as highly controversial – even impossible – because their unique form is not allowed by the ...

Quasicrystals do not have the translational symmetry of ordinary crystals but have a high degree of order in their atomic arrangement. The first quasicrystal was discovered in 1984 by Israeli ...

An international team of researchers has found nine new samples of naturally occurring quasicrystals. The work also provides further proof that quasicrystals were delivered to the Earth by a meteorite ...

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 ...

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 ...

Naturally formed quasicrystals–crystal-like solids with supposedly impossible symmetries–are among the rarest structures on Earth. Only two have ever been found. A team led by Paul Asimow (MS ’93, PhD ...

What makes quasicrystals so interesting? Their unusual structure. Now scientists are actively pursuing this relatively new area of study. When Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman first saw a ...

A strange new substance has unexpectedly emerged from a university lab in Germany: a two-dimensional quasicrystal, consisting of 12-sided, non-repeating atomic units. The quasicrystalline film, ...