Structures of Glassy and Quasicrystalline Phases

The very high temperatures required to melt quartz were not attainable by early craftspersons. Hence, they prepared sodium silicate glass by mixing together and 

Since the initial discovery of metastable quasicrystals, many ternary inter-metallic compounds have been produced in the quasicrystalline state, which are thermodynamically stable at room temperature. These have been obtained 

Some stable ternary intermetallic phases have been found that are quasiperi-odic in two dimensions and periodic in the third. These are from the systems Al—Ni—Co, Al—Cu—Co, and Al—Mn—Pd. They contain decagonally packed groups of atoms (local tenfold rotational symmetry). It should be noted that there are also known metastable quasicrystals with local eightfold rotational symmetry (octagonal) and 12-fold rotational symmetry (dodecagonal) as well. The dodecahedron is also one of the five Platonic solids (Lalena and Cleary, 2005). 

Photo courtesy of the Royal Society. Copyright The Royal Society. Reproduced with permission. 

Sir Frederick Charles Frank (1911-1998) received his Ph.D. in 1937 from Oxford University, followed by a postdoctoral position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fiir Physik in Berlin. During World War II, Frank was involved with the British Chemical Defense Research Establishment, and because of his keen powers of observation and interpretation, he was later transferred to Scientific Intelligence at the British Air Ministry. In 1946, Frank joined the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory at the University of Bristol under its director, Nevill Mott, who encouraged him to look into problems concerned with crystal growth and the plastic deformation of metallic crystals. A stream of successes followed, establishing his scientific fame, as evidenced by many eponyms the Frank-Read source, the Frank dislocation, Frank s rule, Frank-Kasper phases. His theoretical work has been the foundation of research by innumerable scientists from around the world. Frank was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) Medal in 1946, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1954, and was knighted in 1977. 

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