Quasicrystals
A special issue of Materials (ISSN 1996-1944).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2012) | Viewed by 237
Special Issue Editor
Interests: organic synthesis; liquid crystals; conjugated polymers; gels; self-assembly; molecular recognition; electronic materials; photochromism; novel aromatic systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
“We report herein the existence of a metallic solid which diffracts electrons like a single crystal but has point group symmetry m (icosahedral) which is inconsistent with lattice translations.” This was the opening sentence of Shechtman and coworkers’ paper (Shechtman, D.; Blech, I.; Gratias, D.; Cahn, J.W. Metallic phase with long-range orientational order and no translational symmetry. Phys. Rev. Lett. 1984, 53, 1951–1953), which, to date, has been cited more than 3300 times. With this seemingly modest statement, a new branch of science was born: the study of quasicrystals. That paper, and those that followed, challenged the conventional wisdom of X-ray crystallography that allowed for only rotational axes with two, three, four or six-fold symmetry. The observation of five-fold symmetry in an ordered structure, which had been predicted by the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose in the preceding decade, forced materials scientists to revise their understanding of the rules that governed the assembly of atoms and molecules; in recognition of this fundamental contribution, Daniel Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The study of aperiodic crystals and quasicrystals continues to be a dynamic field, and this special issue is dedicated to the ongoing theoretical and experimental developments in this fascinating topic.
Dr. Vance Williams
Guest Editor
Keywords
- aperiodic crystals
- chemistry
- physics
- alloys
- quasicrystals
- crystallography
