Biggest-yet quasicrystal made by shaking metal beads for a week

After being shaken for a few week, hundreds of millimetre-sized steel beads organized themselves into an unique construction referred to as a quasicrystal – and it was the largest one but. The creation additionally helped the researcher behind it win a guess in opposition to a colleague.

For one thing to be a crystal, its constructing blocks have to be organized in a repeating sample, like the right grids of atoms in salt crystals. Inside quasicrystals, some preparations do repeat however by no means in a uniform or predictable means.

Quasicrystals had been first …