In physics, a phason is a form of collective excitation found in aperiodic crystal structures. Phasons are a type of quasiparticle: an emergent phenomenon of many-particle systems. The phason can also be seen as a degree of freedom unique to quasicrystals. Similar to phonons, phasons are quasiparticles associated with atomic motion. However, whereas phonons are related to the translation of atoms, phasons are associated with atomic rearrangement. As a result of this rearrangement, or modulation, the waves that describe the position of atoms in the crystal change phase—hence the term "phason".
In physics, a phason is a form of collective excitation found in aperiodic crystal structures. Phasons are a type of quasiparticle: an emergent phenomenon of many-particle systems. The phason can also be seen as a degree of freedom unique to quasicrystals. Similar to phonons, phasons are quasiparticles associated with atomic motion. However, whereas phonons are related to the translation of atoms, phasons are associated with atomic rearrangement. As a result of this rearrangement, or modulation, the waves that describe the position of atoms in the crystal change phase—hence the term "phason". In the language of the superspace picture commonly employed in the description of aperiodic crystals in which the aperiodic function is obtained via projection from a higher dimensional periodic function, the 'phason' displacement can be seen as displacement of the (higher-dimensional) lattice points in the perpendicular space.
Phasons can travel faster than the speed of sound within quasicrystalline materials, giving these materials a higher thermal conductivity than materials in which the transfer of heat is carried out only by phonons. Different phasonic modes can change the material properties of a quasicrystal.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).