In crystals, atoms are arranged in a repeating pattern. In quasicrystals, atoms are still ordered but the pattern is not periodic: it doesn’t repeat.
- Creating quasicrystals is not easy because of why crystals form in the first place. The 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to an Israeli scientist named Dan Shechtman who discovered Quasicrystal.
- Hundreds of quasicrystals with different symmetries have now been made in the lab. Non-stick frying pans were among the first applications of quasicrystals, owing to the alloys’ low friction, high hardness and low surface reactivity.
- Steel hardened by small quasicrystal particles is used in needles for acupuncture and surgery, dental instruments and razor blades.
- Quasicrystals have been discovered in materials other than metals, including polymers and mixtures of nanoparticles. Computer simulations suggest that quasicrystals should be even more ubiquitous.
Natural sources
- Luca Bindi, Paul Steinhardt, and others reported finding the first natural quasicrystal in 2009 – as microscopic grains in a fragment of the Khatyrka meteorite lying in the Koryak mountains of Russia. The Khatyrka meteorite is believed to have been involved in several collisions in space, over millions of years, at least some of which would have exerted 5 gigapascals (or 10,000 Earth-atmospheres) of pressure and heated it to 1,200º C.
- In 2021, Bindi, Steinhardt, and others raised their hand with a quasicrystal in the remains of the first atomic weapon ever detonated: the Trinity test of the Manhattan Project on July 16, 1945. The thing, they wrote in their paper, “was found in a sample of red trinitite, a combination of glass fused from natural sand and anthropogenic copper from transmission lines used during the test.”
- In a study published in December 2022, Bindi, Steinhardt, and others (again) reported finding a third forge of natural quasicrystals.
- In the Sand Hills dunes in northern Nebraska, they uncovered a metallic fragment in a long, tube-shaped mass of sand heated and fused by a heavy electric current. They also noticed a power line nearby had fallen to the ground. That’s where the metal could have come from, but they couldn’t tell where the current had originated: in the power line or as a lightning strike on a stormy night.
(Sources: Nature and The Hindu)
