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Icosahedral quasicrystals

Assembled with one component

Nature Materials volume 14, pages 18–19 (2015)Cite this article

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Computer simulations of one-component three-dimensional icosahedral quasicrystals will help to understand the mechanisms that may stabilize them in experiments.

Because of their long-range order in the absence of lattice periodicity, quasicrystals have intrigued researchers since Dan Shechtman's initial discovery1. They have been found in many different systems2, most of them consisting of intermetallic compounds (Al-, Zn-, or Cd-based). More recently, planar quasicrystals (that is, periodic stackings of quasicrystal planes) have been observed in soft-condensed matter, where the length scales are much larger and the formation of the quasicrystals is driven by a substantially different energy landscape than that of intermetallic compounds. Explanations for their formation have been based on simple interatomic potentials that model the core–shell structure of the elementary component3 (for example, a micelle). Writing in Nature Materials, Michael Engel, Sharon Glotzer and colleagues now show with molecular dynamics simulations that icosahedral quasicrystals that display quasiperiodic order in all three dimensions can be formed with just one component4.

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Figure 1: Patterns in icosahedral quasicrystals.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marc de Boissieu is at the University Grenoble Alpes and CNRS, SIMaP, F-38000 Grenoble, France,

    Marc de Boissieu

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  1. Marc de Boissieu
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Correspondence to Marc de Boissieu.

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de Boissieu, M. Assembled with one component. Nature Mater 14, 18–19 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4183

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