Laser light reveals unexpected twist in non-repeating tile pattern
Researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo shone laser light onto nanoscale structures built from the "Smith hat" tile and found diffraction behavior never seen before in conventional quasicrystals. The Smith hat tile, or monotile, answered the so-called Einstein problem: whether a single tile shape can cover a surface without the pattern ever repeating. The result was pinwheel-like diffraction patterns that revealed the structure's chiral nature. Senior author Masaya Notomi said the diffraction patterns themselves become chiral because the structure lacks mirror symmetry, a response he called fundamentally different from what shows up in conventional quasicrystalline materials. The findings appear in Nature Communications.
The aperiodic structure gives physicists and optical engineers a new way to bend and twist light into chiral patterns, something conventional quasicrystals do not do.
Source: A new twist on the Einstein problem reveals unexpected physics (iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp).
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