![]() Quasicrystals show many interesting properties which are quite different from that of periodic crystals. ![]() Recent experiments have shown that quasiperiodic order is also oberved in soft matter systems, such as micellars, polymers, and binary nanoparticles. Matter also organizes itself aperiodically at larger length scales where thermal fluctuations play an important role. ![]() Although the majority of the identified quasicrystals are complex metal alloys synthesized in the laboratory, recent experimental results proved that quasiperiodic order is not limited to metals. However more than a hundred complex metal alloys, for instance the discretely diffracting icosahedral AlPdMn or decagonal AlNiCo, have defied these crystallographic rules and self-organized into quasicrystals. Accordingly, the rotational symmetry in real space was thought to be limited to n=2,3,4 and 6. Until the early 1980s it was unanimously established that ordered matter is always periodic. Although the atoms are not localized at periodic positions, quasicrystals posses perfect long-range order. Quasicrystals are somewhat paradoxical structures which exhibit many amazing properties distinguishing them from ordinary crystals.
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