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Quasicrystals as cluster aggregates

Nature Materials volume 3, pages 759–767 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

Quasicrystals are solids that exhibit symmetries long thought forbidden in nature. Since their discovery in a rapidly solidified Al–Mn alloy in 1984, the central issue in the field has been to understand why they form. Are they energetically stable compounds or stabilized by entropy? In recent years, major strides have been made in determining atomic structure, largely by direct imaging using advanced electron microscopy. One system is now known to be energetically stabilized, and quasicrystals are therefore firmly established as a new physical state of matter. They represent a unique packing of atomic clusters some tens of atoms in size, with substantial localized fluctuations, referred to as phasons. Understanding phasons may in future allow their unique macroscopic properties to be tailored for useful materials applications.

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Figure 1: Morphologies of faceted single grains of icosahedral quasicrystals.
Figure 2
Figure 3: Generation of 1D quasiperiodic order from a 2D square lattice.
Figure 4: Atomic configurations commonly found in Cd6X intermetallic compounds.
Figure 5: Atomíc-resolutíon ADF-STEM images of decagonal Al72Ni20Co8 with cluster models.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to A. P. Tsai, K. Saitoh, P. J. Steinhardt, H.-C. Jeong and H. Takakura for collaboration, on which the present article is based. We also thank T. J. Sato, M. Widom, C. L. Henley, M. Miharcovic, W. Steurer, M. de Boissieu, A. Yamamoto, N. Tanaka, K. Ishizuka and H. Inui for valuable comments and discussions. E.A. acknowledges support from the CREST-JST 'Fundamental properties of quasicrystals' project (1996-2001, Project leader: A. P. Tsai). Y.Y. and S.J.P. acknowledge support from the US department of Energy under contract numbers DE-AC36-99GO10337 and DE-AC05-00OR22725.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute for Materials Science, 1-2-1 Sengen, Tsukuba, 305-0047, Japan

    Eiji Abe

  2. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, 80401, Colorado, USA

    Yanfa Yan

  3. Condensed Matter Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, 37831, Tennessee, USA

    Stephen J. Pennycook

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Correspondence to Eiji Abe or Stephen J. Pennycook.

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Abe, E., Yan, Y. & Pennycook, S. Quasicrystals as cluster aggregates. Nature Mater 3, 759–767 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1244

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