Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Israel Institute of Technology. In 1982, he discovered the Icosahedral Phase which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. Quasicrystals are a peculiar form of solid in which the atoms of the solid are arranged in a seemingly regular, yet non-repeating structure. ...
Resources
D. P. DiVincenzo and P. J. Steinhardt, eds. 1991. Quasicrystals: The State of the Art. Directions in Condensed Matter Physics, Vol 11. ISBN 9810205228.
Just ask DanShechtman, who, as a visiting scholar at the National Bureau of Standards (today’s National Institute of Standards and Technology), discovered the icosahedral phase in rapidly solidified aluminum transition metal alloys, opening up the field of quasi-periodic crystals (quasicrystals, or “QCs”) as an area of study in materials science.
The discovery of QCs, Shechtman says, took the community of crystallographers by surprise because it defied a paradigm more than seventy years old, namely, that the hundreds of thousands of crystals studied since crystallography became a science in 1912 were ordered and periodic.
Shechtman’s discovery was recognized in 1988 with The International Award for New Materials of the American Physical Society.
Professor DanShechtman, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences, is a trailblazing scientist who discovered quasi-periodic crystals during the 1980s.
Until Professor Shechtman's discovery there was general agreement that the atomic order of crystals had double, triple, quadruple and 6-fold rotational symmetry axes, but not quintuple axes, a periodic crystal cannot have a 5-fold rotational symmetry axes.
DanShechtman discovered in 1982 that several aluminum alloys produced a diffraction pattern of 5-fold rotational symmetry.
Feeds |
Contact