quasicrystals – Quanta Magazine

A Chemist Shines Light on a Surprising Prime Number Pattern

Natalie Wolchover — Mon, 14 May 2018 05:05:02 +0000

About a year ago, the theoretical chemist Salvatore Torquato met with the number theorist Matthew de Courcy-Ireland to explain that he had done something highly unorthodox with prime numbers, those positive integers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. A professor of chemistry at Princeton University, Torquato normally studies patterns in the structure of physical systems...

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A Bird’s-Eye View of Nature’s Hidden Order

Natalie Wolchover — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:25:42 +0000

Seven years ago, Joe Corbo stared into the eye of a chicken and saw something astonishing. The color-sensitive cone cells that carpeted the retina (detached from the fowl, and mounted under a microscope) appeared as polka dots of five different colors and sizes. But Corbo observed that, unlike the randomly dispersed cones in human eyes, or the neat rows of cones in the eyes of many fish...

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A Quasicrystal’s Shocking Origin

Natalie Wolchover — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 15:44:24 +0000

The story of what must surely be the most interesting rock in the world has taken yet another turn. First, a recap: The rock, found some years ago in the basement of an Italian museum, turned out to be the only known natural “quasicrystal” — a dazzling, enigmatic form of matter in which atoms tessellate space in a pattern that never quite repeats. Additional tests revealed that the rock is the...

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In a Grain, a Glimpse of the Cosmos

Natalie Wolchover — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 09:00:58 +0000

One January afternoon five years ago, Princeton geologist Lincoln Hollister opened an email from a colleague he’d never met bearing the subject line, “Help! Help! Help!” Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist and the director of Princeton’s Center for Theoretical Science, wrote that he had an extraordinary rock on his hands, one that he thought was natural but whose origin and formation he could...

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Solid or Liquid? Physicists Redefine States of Matter

Natalie Wolchover — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:42:46 +0000

Why can you stand on a glacier but not the ocean? The answer seems simple enough: Liquids flow. Solids don’t. The atoms in liquids can slosh around. In solids, they fall lockstep into a crystal lattice. A crystal’s endlessly repeating pattern is so stable that it takes a considerable infusion of energy to make the atoms break rank. Or so physics textbooks say. But this long-accepted explanation...

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