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Mesoporous silica

Holey quasicrystals

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 749–751 (2012)Cite this article

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The self-assembly of surfactant micelles in the formation of templated mesoporous silicas can be tuned to produce mesoporous materials with quasicrystalline ordering, proving that quasicrystals are indeed a general form of ordered but non-periodic matter.

Quasicrystals are not conventional crystals, as they contain no long range translational periodicity. They are far from amorphous however, as the local structure is highly ordered, composed of a set of regular elements arranged in a non-periodic fashion1. Since their initial report in 1984, the majority of thermodynamically stable quasicrystalline materials synthesized have been metal alloys2. In more recent times, quasicrystallinity has entered the realm of soft materials, including liquid crystals, polymers and colloids3,4,5. Now, writing in Nature, Osamu Terasaki and colleagues report that the range of materials showing quasicrystalline ordering has expanded to include nanoporous inorganic materials6.

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Figure 1: The formation mechanism of the templated nanoporous silicas.
Figure 2: Mesoporous quasicrystals6.

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  1. Sarah H. Tolbert is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095-1569, USA,

    Sarah H. Tolbert

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  1. Sarah H. Tolbert
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Correspondence to Sarah H. Tolbert.

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Tolbert, S. Holey quasicrystals. Nature Mater 11, 749–751 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3414

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