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13-Mar-2008

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How Does Your Quasicrystal Grow?, Nature
 









Excerpts: Somewhere between the amorphous glasses and the rigidly regimented
periodic crystals lie the quasicrystals: ordered, predictable, yet non-periodic
arrangements of atoms. How do these strange structures form?  Such
investigations could provide a new understanding of why quasicrystals form, and
make it possible to grow even more highly perfect quasicrystalline solids, as
well as quasicrystalline colloids and more general self-assembled
heterostructures. Intriguing as such studies are on a fundamental level, there
is also a strong practical interest in understanding these materials:
quasicrystalline solids are stronger and less deformable than normal crystals
made of similar elements, and the photonic bandgap structure in some quasi-
crystal dielectric heterostructures might make them immensely valuable in
circuits that won the basis not of electrons, but of light.
Source: How Does Your Quasicrystal Grow?[
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7183/full/452043a.html ], Paul J.
Steinhardt, Nature, Vol 452, 08/03/06

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