Yuto Moritake<\/a>, an experimental physicist at the University of Tokyo, first came across the hat tile in a popular science book in 2024. Moritake specializes in photonic crystals \u2014 materials patterned with repeating structures (often much thinner than a human hair) that bend and steer light for uses like lasers and optical sensors. Almost all photonic crystals rely on patterns that repeat in a regular grid. Moritake wondered what would happen if he swapped that repetition for the hat tile’s never-repeating arrangement.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n
“I decided to include it in our photonic crystal structure,” Moritake told Live Science, describing it as the starting point for the project.<\/p>\n
To build the structure, Moritake and his colleagues used two precision manufacturing techniques, called electron beam lithography and etching, to punch hundreds of thousands of tiny holes \u2014 each just 100 nanometers in radius, or roughly 500 times thinner than a human hair \u2014 into a thin film of silicon nitride. This ceramic material is commonly used in computer chips. The holes were arranged according to the hat tile’s pattern, covering a chip roughly half a millimeter across \u202a\u2014\u202c about the width of a pencil tip.<\/p>\n
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When the team shined a laser at the finished chip, the light scattered, or diffracted, into a pinwheel-shaped pattern that appeared on a screen. Moritake first photographed the colorful pattern using his iPhone’s long-exposure mode. The setting captured faint light over several seconds. Then, he switched to specialized cameras for more precise measurements.<\/p>\n
The pattern was made up of well-defined bright spots, called Bragg peaks, that stayed in the same positions no matter where on the chip the laser hit. That consistency confirmed that the structure had the kind of long-range, predictable order found in a quasicrystal \u2014 a class of material whose atoms (or, in this case, holes) follow an orderly pattern that never repeats, unlike the repeating grids found in ordinary crystals such as table salt or diamonds.<\/p>\n
Because the hat tile itself has no mirror symmetry \u2014 meaning it doesn’t look the same as its own reflection, similar to how a left hand differs from a right hand \u2014 the scattering pattern it produced was also asymmetrical in this way. Scientists call this property chirality.<\/p>\n
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That chirality led to the study’s biggest surprise. Light can be circularly polarized, meaning it spins either clockwise or counterclockwise as it travels, like a corkscrew. When Moritake tested the structure with both types of spinning light, he found a subtle difference in how each direction scattered off the crystal. Ordinary quasicrystals, which do have mirror symmetry, cannot produce this kind of effect.<\/p>\n
“This structure can have some kind of circular polarization dependence,” Moritake said, adding that the effect \u2014 made only possible by the tile\u2019s asymmetry \u2014 was not something he initially expected to find .<\/p>\n
Now, Moritake wants to apply this never-repeating pattern to control light traveling inside a photonic chip, rather than light that simply bounces off its surface. This could lead to future uses in optical communications and optical computing \u202a\u2014\u202c technologies that use light instead of electricity to transmit or process information, Moritake said.<\/p>\n
See how much you know about Albert Einstein with our Albert Einstein quiz!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Physicists have built a crystal out of an “einstein” tile \u2014 an elusive shape mathematicians spent years searching…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[85,46,370,141],"class_list":["post-576519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}