quasicrystal
Sign in to savethumb|Potential energy surface for silver depositing on an aluminium–[[palladium–manganese (Al–Pd–Mn) quasicrystal surface. Similar to Fig. 6 in Ref.]]
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- crystal system
- Subclass of
- crystal structure
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- Ho-Mg-ZnQuasicrystal.jpg
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- Commons category
- Quasicrystals
- has characteristic
- aperiodic tiling
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thumb|Potential energy surface for silver depositing on an aluminium–[[palladium–manganese (Al–Pd–Mn) quasicrystal surface. Similar to Fig. 6 in Ref.]]
A quasiperiodic crystal, or quasicrystal, is a structure that is ordered but not periodic. A quasicrystalline pattern can continuously fill all available space, but it lacks translational symmetry. While crystals, according to the classical crystallographic restriction theorem, can possess only two-, three-, four-, and six-fold rotational symmetries, the Bragg diffraction pattern of quasicrystals shows sharp peaks with other symmetry orders—for instance, five-fold.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “quasicrystal” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.