The Mystery of How Quasicrystals Form

Quasicrystals, first discovered in 1982 by Dan Shechtman, are exotic materials whose atoms form intricate, nonrepeating patterns such as pentagons and decagons, defying traditional crystallographic rules and intuition. These patterns exhibit “forbidden” symmetries, like fivefold rotational symmetry, which cannot tile space periodically. The concept of such quasiperiodic patterns was mathematically anticipated by Roger Penrose in the 1970s through his Penrose tilings, which cover a plane without gaps or overlaps but never repeat exactly. Shechtman’s discovery of quasicrystals in metal alloys challenged long-held assumptions in materials science and earned him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Recent research, particularly from the University of Michigan, has shed light on the formation and stability of quasicrystals. One study demonstrated that some quasicrystals are thermodynamically stable, meaning their atomic arrangements represent a minimum energy state rather than transient or metast