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To the surprise of many, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Dan Shechtman (Technion Haifa, Israel) for the discovery of quasicrystals. In quasicrystals, atom positions are ordered, but show five-, eight-, ten-, or twelvefold rotational symmetry not found in standard crystals, and was long thought to be impossible. In particular, Linus Paulings life-long opposition to Shechtmans interpretation was notorious. Tilings of pentagons discovered by mathematician Roger Penrose are key to the understanding of these infinite aperiodic structures. Such motifs were also used by Arab artists as early as the 13th century. The Swedish Academy praises Shechtman for "not only the discovery of quasicrystals, but the realization of the importance of this result and the determination to communicate it to a skeptical scientific community."
Quasicrystalline structures were found to occur in intermetallics by Shechtman, and also in dendrimer liquid crystals, star copolymers, self-assemblies of nanoparticles, as well as naturally in a mineral found in Russia by other researchers. Intermetallic quasicrystals are often brittle and their transport properties resemble glasses rather than crystalline materials. Their surface energy is low, and they are quite resistant to corrosion and adhesion.
Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv in 1941. He studied materials engineering at Technion and received a PhD in 1972 in metallurgy.
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