NewScientist (17 December 2016) reports on a very rare form of solid material:
THERE’S more than one way to cook a quasicrystal. A third example of these weird, rule-breaking solids has been found in a Siberian meteorite – and it’s the only one not to have been first created in the lab.
Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University has doggedly hunted for quasicrystals since he predicted their existence in the early 1980s. The first synthetic one was grown in the lab in 1982, and more than 100 types have been made since.
Before then, we knew of two types of solids: crystals, in which every atom is arranged neatly in a repeating lattice, and amorphous solids, which have no such order. Quasicrystals are not quite crystals because their neat patterns never exactly repeat.
The new one is only the third type found in nature. All three have come from the Khatyrka meteorite in north-eastern Russia. The approximate composition of the first two had been created in a lab beforehand.
It almost sounds like a contaminant situation. But what are they useful for?
But as with the other quasicrystals, nobody is quite sure what it could be used for. Steinhardt has a quasicrystal-coated frying pan in a corner of his office that takes advantage of this material’s hard, slippery nature, but no other practical applications have been found yet.
Hmmmm.
