Aperiodic crystals: A contradictio in terminis?

Abstract

Although in the prevailing view a necessary condition for having a crystalline phase is lattice periodicity, it has become clear in the last decades that there are physical systems with many properties of the usual crystalline state but without three-dimensional lattice periodicity. Incommensurate modulated crystals have been known now for some time, and a couple of years ago much excitement was raised by the discovery of quasicrystals, systems with long-range order but with five-fold symmetry axes, which exclude lattice periodicity. A discussion is given of the various generalizations of the concept of lattice periodicity. In fact, these go from ordinary periodic crystal st structures to almost chaotic ones. One of these is the notion of quasiperiodicity. Section two deals with a special type of these quasiperiodic systems, tilings or space fillings with tiles or blocks of a small number of types. In section three the symmetry of quasiperiodic systems is discussed. Here the embedding into a higher-dimensional space is the key concept. Section four deals with N-dimensional crystallographic groups that occur as symmetry groups of quasiperiodic systems, so called superspace groups. In section five the diffraction from quasiperiodic systems is treated, and in section six it is shown that in some cases quasiperiodic structures may be approximated by periodic ones, and that periodic systems sometimes are more conveniently described by quasiperiodic ones. The emphasis in the symmetry discussion is on quasicrystals. This is even more so in the remaining sections. Section seven gives a brief account of the many experimental data, section eight describes what is known about the microscopic structure. Imperfections are even more important for quasiperiodic systems than for periodic ones. They are discussed in section nine. Not only microscopically do quasiperiodic systems have similarities with ordinary crystals, but also macroscopically. The morphological laws may be generalized to quasiperiodic systems, as shown in section ten. The consequences of quasiperiodicity on the physical properties is still to a large extent unclear. Mathematically they differ much from periodic systems. A discussion of a number of results is given in section eleven.