{"id":79003,"date":"2025-08-18T15:29:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T15:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/79003\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T15:29:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T15:29:06","slug":"quasicrystals-spill-secrets-of-their-formation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/79003\/","title":{"rendered":"Quasicrystals Spill Secrets of Their Formation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThat\u2019s just freaking awesome. It\u2019s a really clever thing,\u201d Glotzer said. \u201cUntil now, no one has ever successfully tried to do DFT calculations on something that wasn\u2019t periodic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cmu.edu\/physics\/people\/faculty\/widom.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Widom<\/a>, a physicist at Carnegie Mellon University, said the stability result might help explain how quasicrystals form in the first place. \u201cIt answers a fundamental question. If you\u2019re confronted with the existence of something, you would like to know, \u2018Why does it exist?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt satisfies intellectual curiosity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Materials naturally tend toward lower-energy states. The overall energy depends on how closely atoms are packed together, as well as the shapes of their bonds. In the quasicrystals that the Michigan team studied, the rhombic triacontahedrons forced quasiperiodic patterns and appeared to require relatively little energy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe haven\u2019t proven this conclusively, but my interpretation is that the triacontahedrons, these building blocks of quasicrystals, are a very happy shape,\u201d Sun said. \u201cBy happy, I mean a low-energy, stable-shaped building block.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dynabead Quasicrystals<\/p>\n<p>A recently published experiment led by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.brennansprinkle.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Brennan Sprinkle<\/a>, an applied mathematician at the Colorado School of Mines, was designed to guide particles to that happy place.<\/p>\n<p>Atoms are so tiny that physicists can\u2019t easily observe or control their assembly into quasicrystals. So Sprinkle and his collaborators developed a new, comparatively simple fabrication method: They grew quasicrystals out of commercially sold particles called Dynabeads. At micrometers across \u2014 10,000 times larger than individual atoms \u2014 Dynabeads are vastly more easily controlled and observed. Using magnetic and electrical fields, the researchers induced quasiperiodic structures to \u201cjust fold out from some nucleation point like a three-dimensional snowflake,\u201d Sprinkle said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThat\u2019s just freaking awesome. It\u2019s a really clever thing,\u201d Glotzer said. \u201cUntil now, no one has ever successfully&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[49,48,314,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-79003","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-physics","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}