THE DISCOVERY of a shape-shifting crystal that breaks all the rules of what a crystal should be has won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
Daniel Shechtman of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa is the sole recipient of the 10 million kronor award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced yesterday.
The atoms in crystals automatically fall into a rigidly defined pattern that is repeated and repeated without exception. The chemist found a substance that broke the rules, however, a “quasicrystal” where atoms formed regular but non-repeating patterns.
His breakthrough finding was likened yesterday to the non-periodic mosaics found on the walls of the Alhambra Palace near Granada, Spain. Yet Shechtman had a tough battle to have his discovery recognised as true.
The discovery dates back to 1982 while working in the US. He had produced a molten mixture of aluminium and manganese then chilled it rapidly. It looked unusual so he scanned its surface with an electron microscope only to find that the atoms had rearranged themselves into unusual patterns that broke the laws of nature.
“People just laughed at me,” he said during an interview earlier this year. He faced ridicule and was asked to leave his research group for “bringing disgrace” on the team.
Yet the research findings stood on their own merits and two years later he managed to get his work published in a reviewed journal. Eventually fellow scientists had to accept that he had in fact produced a new solid state.
Hundreds of quasicrystals have been made since and two years ago natural ones were found in minerals recovered from a river in Russia. The new materials have many potential uses within industry based on their differing physical properties.
The nature of crystals is that they repeat in three dimensions and yet quasicrystals have escaped these bounds, said Dr Helge Muller-Bunz, an X-ray crystalographer in University College Dublin’s school of chemistry and chemical biology.
“He has found a regular arrangement of atoms that is not repeating. No one expected to find anything like that in three dimensional space. It basically redefines the solid state, or created a new solid state,” he said.
“Daniel Shechtman’s work has radically moved the boundaries that scientific theory imposed on our understanding of the possible 3D structures of matter,” said Prof Sylvia Draper of the school of chemistry at Trinity College Dublin.
“Branches of research previously thought to be dead-ends have suddenly become viable avenues of study. There is order in the chaos.”