Photo: Primož Ziherl
Publish Date: 01.09.2017
Category: Researchers in focus
Primož Ziherl from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Ljubljana and Tomonari Dotera and Shinichi Bekku from the University of Kindai of Osaka published an article entitled "Bronze-Mean Hexagonal Quasicrystal" in the renowned journal Nature Materials. The article suggests the existence of a two-dimensional quasicrystal which originates in the bronze mean and has six-figure symmetry. This type of quasicrystal formation is interesting because it supplements the Penrose and Ammann-Beenker tiling, which is based on the gold or silver mean, and because they pointed out that the quasicrystal order does not have a necessarily suppressed symmetry.
The new hexagonal quasicrystal tiling is formed by three types of tiles – small and large equilateral triangles and rectangles, which are arranged on the basis of a previously unknown inflational rule. Dotera, Bekku and Ziherl used numerical simulations to demonstrate that the disordered variant of the new quasicrystal can be obtained in a mono-dispersion particle system with very simple step reflective interaction. Furthermore, the structure of the hexagonal quasicrystal was analyzed in detail using multi-dimensional analysis, where the 2D structure is presented as a projection of the crystal in a 6D space. The local structural motives, characteristic for hexagonal quasicrystals, can be detected in approximants to alloy metals and silicon, in ultra-thin layers of barium titanate and in binary mixtures of nano particles. Therefore, it can be expected that the new quasicrystal itself could be experimentally detected in these kinds of systems.
Read more about the article here.