Abstract
After the discovery of an unquestionably perfect quasicrystal by Tsai et al. (Jpn J Appl Phys 26:L1505, 1987), a new debate immediately began: Why do quasicrystals form? Are they actually stable forms of matter like crystals? Some have argued that all quasicrystals are inherently delicate, metastable oddities that must be synthesized under highly controlled laboratory conditions (Henley in Quasicrystals: the state of the art. World Scientific, Singapore, pp. 429–524, 1991). By contrast, Levine and Steinhardt (Phys Rev Lett 53:2477–2480, 1984) showed that, in principle, quasicrystals could be as stable and robust as crystals. According to the latter hypothesis, is it possible that Nature had beat us to the punch by forming quasicrystals long before they were made in the laboratory? There were numerous motivations for pursuing this question. For geoscience, the discovery of a natural quasicrystal would have opened a new chapter in the study of mineralogy, forever altering the conventional classification of mineral forms.
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Notes
- 1.
The diffraction pattern of an ideal three-dimensional quasicrystal consists of Bragg peaks located on a lattice given by \(\bar{Q} = \sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{6} {n_{i} b_{i} }\) where the bi are basis vectors pointing to the vertices along the six five-fold symmetry axes of a regular icosahedron in three dimensions, and the ni are integers that index each vector. The bi vectors were chosen as follows: b1 = (1, τ, 0), b2 = (τ, 0, 1), b3 = (0, 1, τ), b4 = (−1, τ, 0), b5 = (τ, 0, −1), b6 = (0, −1, τ), where τ is the golden ratio, (1 + √5)/2.
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Bindi, L. (2020). Can Nature Have Beaten Us to the Punch?. In: Natural Quasicrystals. SpringerBriefs in Crystallography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45677-1_3
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