Quasi-crystalline order in vibrated granular matter

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Quasi-crystalline order in vibrated granular matter
المؤلفون: Plati, Andrea, Maire, Raphael, Fayen, Etienne, Boulogne, Francois, Restagno, Frederic, Smallenburg, Frank, Foffi, Giuseppe
المصدر: Nature Physics 2024
سنة النشر: 2023
المجموعة: Condensed Matter
مصطلحات موضوعية: Condensed Matter - Soft Condensed Matter, Condensed Matter - Statistical Mechanics
الوصف: Quasi-crystals are aperiodic structures that present crystallographic properties which are not compatible with that of a single unit cell. Their revolutionary discovery in a metallic alloy, less than three decades ago, has required a full reconsideration of what we defined as a crystal structure. Surprisingly, quasi-crystalline structures have been discovered also at much larger length scales in different microscopic systems for which the size of elementary building blocks ranges between the nanometric to the micrometric scale. Here, we report the first experimental observation of spontaneous quasi-crystal self-assembly at the millimetric scale. This result is obtained in a fully athermal system of macroscopic spherical grains vibrated on a substrate. Starting from a liquid-like disordered phase, the grains begin to locally arrange into three types of squared and triangular tiles that eventually align, forming 8-fold symmetric quasi-crystal that has been predicted in simulation but not yet observed experimentally in non-atomic systems. These results are not only the proof of a novel route to spontaneously assemble quasi-crystals but are of fundamental interest for the connection between equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical physics.
Comment: 4 Pages, 3 Figures
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1038/s41567-023-02364-1
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01643
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.2307.01643
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv
الوصف
DOI:10.1038/s41567-023-02364-1