Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A structural form of matter that is less orderly than a crystal and more orderly than a glass.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun physics, chemistry any solid with conventional crystalline properties but exhibiting a point group symmetry inconsistent with translational periodicity

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Steinhardt coined the term quasicrystal to describe this pattern.

    NPR Topics: News 2011

  • If you or your mate shaved this morning with one of those thin-foil electric shavers, that face probably brushed up against a strange form of matter called a quasicrystal.

    NPR Topics: News 2011

  • What Dr Shechtman had discovered, he realised, was a new sort of material called a quasicrystal.

    The Economist: Daily news and views 2011

  • What Dr Shechtman had discovered, he realised, was a new sort of material called a quasicrystal.

    The Economist: Daily news and views 2011

  • A quasicrystal is a solid whose components exhibit long-range order, but without a single pattern or a unit cell that repeats.

    PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2009

  • A quasicrystal is a solid whose components exhibit long-range order, but without a single pattern or a unit cell that repeats.

    PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories 2009

  • Duke University materials scientists have developed a computer model of how a "quasicrystal" metallic alloy interacts with a gas at various temperatures and pressures.

    Some Politics, Some Science 2005

  • Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The atomic model of an Ag-Al quasicrystal.

    Crystal-Patterns Finding Nets Nobel Robert Lee Hotz 2011

  • A team of researchers says it has found in a Russian mineral sample the first natural example of a quasicrystal, an unusual material that displays some of the properties of a crystal but boasts a more intricate and complex structure.

    Friday! vanuslux 2009

  • And when he combed through thousands of photos of medieval Islamic buildings, he found that same set of shapes increasingly used over the years to make ever-more complex patterns, including a seemingly true quasicrystal by 1453.

    Geometry Meets Arts in Islamic Tiles JDsg 2007

  • Materials scientist Dan Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, materials with atoms arranged in an orderly structure that never repeats, often described as analogs to Penrose’s tilings (SN: 10/5/11).

    Mathematicians have finally discovered an elusive ‘einstein’ tile E-mail 2023

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  • Scientific American: 'A team of researchers says they have found in a Russian mineral sample the first natural example of a quasicrystal, an unusual material that displays some of the properties of a crystal but boasts a more intricate and complex structure. Since quasicrystals were characterized 25 years ago, numerous versions have been cooked up in the laboratory, but a natural example would indicate that nature's products are more diverse than previously thought.

    'Quasicrystals display ordered arrangements and symmetries but are not periodic—that is, they are not defined by a single unit cell (such as a cube) that simply repeats itself in three dimensions. The term "quasicrystal" was coined by physicists Dov Levine and Paul Steinhardt, both then at the University of Pennsylvania, to describe the class of quasiperiodic crystals in 1984, shortly after another group published observational evidence for such a material.'

    June 5, 2009