{"id":155451,"date":"2023-01-14T00:24:09","date_gmt":"2023-01-14T06:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/quasicrystal-with-a-flashy-origin"},"modified":"2023-01-14T00:24:09","modified_gmt":"2023-01-14T06:24:09","slug":"quasicrystal-with-a-flashy-origin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/quasicrystal-with-a-flashy-origin","title":{"rendered":"Quasicrystal with a \u201cFlashy\u201d Origin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/quasicrystal-with-a-flashy-origin2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The meteorite and explosion-site quasicrystals were both uncovered by a team that includes Luca Bindi of the University of Florence, Italy, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. In those previous cases, the materials were subjected to extremely high-pressure, high-temperature shock events\u2014analysis of the meteorite sample revealed the temperature reached at least 1,200 \u00b0C and the pressure 5 GPa, while the New Mexico sample reached 1,500 \u00b0C and closer to 8 GPa. These transient, intense conditions contorted the materials\u2019 atoms, forcing them to arrange into patterns unseen for usual laboratory conditions.<\/p>\n<p>The explosion-site sample was found in a rock-like substance made of sand that had been fused together with copper wires from a measurement device that had been set up to monitor the atom-bomb test. As a trained geologist, Bindi was aware that similar substances\u2014so-called fulgurites\u2014are created when lightning strikes a beach or a sand dune. He wondered if lightning-fused samples might also contain quasicrystals, so he and the team set about collecting and analyzing the structures of as many fulgurites as they could lay their hands on.<\/p>\n<p>Luck was on their side. In a fragment of a storm-created fulgurite from the Nebraskan Sand Hills\u2014grass-stabilized sand dunes in northern Nebraska\u2014the team found a micron-sized fragment of a quasicrystal with a previously unseen composition and pattern. Specifically, the newly discovered quasicrystal has a dodecagonal\u201412-fold symmetric\u2014atomic structure. Such ordering is impossible in ordinary crystals, Bindi says, and is unusual even for quasicrystals (both the meteorite and explosion-site quasicrystals, as well as most lab-made ones, have fivefold symmetric patterns). \u201cThis was all more than [we] could have hoped for in such a long-shot search,\u201d Steinhardt says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The meteorite and explosion-site quasicrystals were both uncovered by a team that includes Luca Bindi of the University of Florence, Italy, and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. In those previous cases, the materials were subjected to extremely high-pressure, high-temperature shock events\u2014analysis of the meteorite sample revealed the temperature reached at least 1,200 \u00b0C and the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}