CNRS Île-de-France has published an article featuring research led by Marianne Impéror, CNRS research director at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (LPS) in Orsay. This pioneering work explores the self-assembly of nanoparticles to create ordered yet aperiodic structures with unique properties.
Summary:
Forty years after the discovery of quasicrystals, Marianne Impéror took on an unprecedented challenge: to recreate quasicrystals at the nanometric scale through self-assembly. With her team from the ANR Soft-QC project, she discovered a new quasicrystal with 8-fold symmetry, first predicted by numerical simulations and then achieved experimentally. Published in Nature Physics, this breakthrough also led to the identification of a new type of aperiodic tiling in mathematics. These results open new perspectives for real-time observation of quasicrystal self-assembly.
Read the full article on the CNRS website:
Quasicrystals: journey into the heart of ordered and aperiodic matter (CNRS, April 24, 2025)
