SPECIAL PHYSICS COLLOQUIUM

Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt, Princeton University

"Once Upon a Time in Kamchatka: The Extraordinary Search for Natural Quasicrystals"

RLM 4.102 (John A. Wheeler Lecture Hall).

Abstract:

Quasicrystals, solids with symmetries forbidden to crystals, were unknown before 1984 and, for the last twenty-five years, the only examples were synthesized in the laboratory under artificial conditions.

But could Nature have beaten us to the punch? The twelve-year effort to answer that question makes for one of the stranger scientific stories you are ever likely to hear.