How Atoms Themselves Create a Mosaic That Never Repeats
Ordinary tiles form a repeating pattern. But atoms can do more: under certain conditions, they themselves lay out a complex mosaic where the pattern never repeats, like on antique tile panels.
Dance of Dipoles and Light: The Birth of a Dodecagonal Quasicrystal
In 1984, the world of crystallography was turned upside down: sharp diffraction peaks with fivefold symmetry were discovered in an alloy of aluminum and manganese – as if nature had mocked the strict theorems forbidding repeating patterns from having axes of order 5, 8, 10, or 12.