(Phys.org) —Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames Laboratory have discovered a new family of rare-earth quasicrystals using an algorithm they developed to help pinpoint them.

In research that could jumpstart interest into an enigmatic class of materials known as quasicrystals, MIT scientists and colleagues have discovered a relatively simple, flexible way to create new ...

For a long time, scientists associated crystal structures with an ordered arrangement of atoms in a repeating lattice-like pattern, believing it to be the most stable configuration. However, by the ...

Quasicrystals are a unique class of materials with considerable promise for practical applications because of their unusual properties. But progress toward realizing that commercial potential has been ...

Until 1982, quasicrystals weren't just undiscovered, they were believed to be physically impossible. Mathematicians now offer a key proof in the study of quasicrystals. The work, which was 10 years in ...

Naturally formed quasicrystals–crystal-like solids with supposedly impossible symmetries–are among the rarest structures on Earth. Only two have ever been found. A team led by Paul Asimow (MS ’93, PhD ...

The discovery of quasicrystals in the early 1980s won Daniel Schechtman the Nobel Prize in October, but it wasn’t until January that scientists announced the where the rare substance occurs in nature.

Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals. The 1982 breakthrough fundamentally changed the way chemists look at solid ...

A scientist whose work was so controversial he was ridiculed and asked to leave his research group has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Daniel Shechtman, 70, a researcher at Technion-Israel Institute ...

When Paul Steinhardt made a discovery that he had been working toward for more than 20 years, he did not cry “Eureka!” On that winter morning in the lab in 2009, he writes, he and a colleague “were ...

A strange new substance has unexpectedly emerged from a university lab in Germany: a two-dimensional quasicrystal, consisting of 12-sided, non-repeating atomic units. The quasicrystalline film, ...

Scientists searching for quasicrystals—so-called ‘impossible’ materials with unusual, non-repeating structures—have identified one in remnants of the world’s first nuclear bomb test. The previously ...