Goes to quasicrystals and specifically Shechtman - Technion having a good run of late, eh? - 27 years after the fact. Nobel Committee back to form, then.
A few people have asked me, so I'll say roughly the sum total of what I learnt about quasicrystals from the lecture a few weeks ago:
They're ordered non-crystals. Meaning that they're still ordered in some way, and have some sort of symmetry, usually rotational (I don't know if you can have glide symmetry alone without translational... but it doesn't really matter as I would be astonished to find a real-life material with glide symmetry. We're talking condensed matter phys-er, science here. Real world). But not translational. Meaning if you move it around at all it'll look different - as opposed to a true crystal, where if you move it the right amount (specifically, move it by an integer linear combination of the lattice vectors), it looks exactly the same.
So that's all I know about quasicrystals. Sorry.
EDIT: And yes, the place I learnt (briefly) about quasicrystals was in a Condensed Matter Physics course.
No comments:
Post a Comment