Overview
- Presents the discovery of the first natural quasicrystal
- Describes icosahedrite (Al63Cu24Fe13) in detail
- Demonstrates that quasicrystals are stable in our solar system
Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Crystallography (SBC)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book describes the discovery of quasicrystals (icosahedral and decagonal) in an extraterrestrial rock from the Koryak Mountains of Far Eastern Russia. After a decade-long search for a natural quasicrystal, this discovery opened a new avenue in mineralogy and crystallography that could lead to further discoveries in geoscience, astronomy, condensed matter physics, and materials engineering. For the first time, minerals have been discovered that violate the symmetry restrictions of conventional crystallography. The natural occurrence of such crystals was unexpected, involving previously unknown processes. The fact that the quasicrystals were found in a meteorite formed in the earliest moments of the solar system means these processes have been active for over 4.5 billion years and have influenced the composition of the first objects to condense around the Sun. Finding quasicrystals formed in these extreme environments also informed the longstanding debate concerning the stabilityand robustness of quasicrystals. Recent shock experiments lend support to the hypothesis that the extraterrestrial quasicrystals formed as a result of hypervelocity impacts between objects in the early Solar system, and that they are probably less rare in the Milky Way.
Reviews
“The book is currently the only available textbook on natural quasicrystals. Overall, it includes both basics and advanced discussions covering descriptive, experimental, and theoretical mineralogy, nevertheless is concise and written in plain sentences. … This book is strongly recommended to both experienced mineralogists and petrologists, as well as beginners, and in particular, for the high-pressure mineral physics and meteoritics researchers.” (Naotaka Tomioka,American Mineralogist, Vol. 106, 2021)
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Natural Quasicrystals
Book Subtitle: The Solar System’s Hidden Secrets
Authors: Luca Bindi
Series Title: SpringerBriefs in Crystallography
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45677-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental Science, Earth and Environmental Science (R0)
Copyright Information: The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-45676-4Published: 21 April 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-45677-1Published: 20 April 2020
Series ISSN: 2524-8596
Series E-ISSN: 2524-860X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 89
Number of Illustrations: 40 b/w illustrations, 21 illustrations in colour
Topics: Mineralogy, Crystallography and Scattering Methods, Planetology, Geology, Materials Science, general