Quasi Crystals

[Lazerbeak]

This is some deep stuff...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

A fairly recent discovery, thought to be an impossibility until now.

Numerous applications including advanced lasers

~ LB

 

[Sigurthr]

I remember hearing about this a year or so ago in a chem/physics lecture I watched online. They related it to special tessellations with mixed materials. It was quite fascinating.

 

[Lazerbeak]

I heard about them through a different source. I just posted the wiki because it was the most credible. Apparently, it has sparked some interest among advanced technology circles. They said there were some advance laser applications. Now that I understand the nature of the process of constructing Laser Diodes I suppose it makes sense that the combining of dissimilar materials could be relevant to the construction of lasing mediums but it just boggles my mind considering that these would than take that matrix into a three dimensional crystal lattice of some sort. Hope I'm interpreting that correctly.

Bohr showed that quasiperiodic functions arise as restrictions of high-dimensional periodic functions to an irrational slice (an intersection with one or more hyperplanes), and discussed their Fourier point spectrum. In order that the quasicrystal itself be aperiodic, this slice must avoid any lattice plane of the higher-dimensional lattice. De Bruijn showed that Penrose tilings can be viewed as two-dimensional slices of five-dimensional hypercubic structures.

This is fascinating...

~ LB

 

[Lazerbeak]

~ lb