Quasi-crystalline order in vibrated granular matter

Abstract

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.

4 Pages, 3 Figures

References in corpus (5)

• scikit-image: Image processing in Python
• Phase Diagram of Vertically Shaken Granular Matter
• Crystallization of a quasi-two-dimensional granular fluid
• Soft quasicrystals - Why are they stable?
• Navier--Stokes transport coefficients for a model of a confined quasi-two-dimensional granular binary mixture

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Enhancing (quasi-)long-range order in a two-dimensional driven crystal
• Interplay between an absorbing phase transition and synchronization in a driven granular system
• Reducing segregation in vibrated binary-sized granular mixtures by excessive small particle introduction
• Non-equilibrium coexistence between a fluid and a hotter or colder crystal of granular hard disks
• Automating Blueprints for Colloidal Quasicrystal Assembly
• Diffusion of impurities in a moderately dense confined granular gas
• Self-assembly and non-equilibrium phase coexistence in a binary granular mixture
• Atomistic mechanisms of dynamics in a two-dimensional dodecagonal quasicrystal
• Defects Enhance Stability in 12-fold Symmetric Soft-Matter Quasicrystals
• Mesoscale Field Theory for Quasicrystals
• Fast event-driven simulations for soft spheres: from dynamics to Laves phase nucleation
• Transport properties in a model of confined granular mixtures at moderate densities
• Host-atom-driven transformation of a honeycomb oxide into a dodecagonal quasicrystal
• Modeling dislocations in quasicrystals through amplitude equations