Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "Impossible Crystals"

Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "Impossible Crystals"


Daniel Shechtman
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year goes to the Israeli physicist Daniel Shechtman for the discovery of the so-called quasicrystals. Quasicrystals are solids in which the atoms are indeed arranged regularly, but which have no periodic crystal lattice. Until its discovery in 1982, it was accepted that the absence of such solids. Because of their lack of translational symmetry quasicrystals exhibit a very low electrical and thermal conductivity. In addition, the materials are extremely hard, brittle, highly resistant to corrosion and have a very low coefficient of friction and wetting.

Besides the purely technical but the methodological significance of the discovery should weigh much heavier. The unusual discovery was "the understanding of the chemistry of solids changed fundamentally," it says in the grounds of the Nobel Committee. For Shechtman, the price is also a kind of reparation later, because his work has long been controversial - he was expelled from his research group and had to fight to publish his results.

A first paper was - officially because of lack of relevance to science - initially rejected. In 1984 it succeeded Shechtman together with three colleagues, an article in the prestigious Physical Review Letters place. Asked by an interviewer in early 2010 after the lesson from these experiences, Shechtman said: "If you're a scientist who believes in its results, then you have to fight for it." That has now clearly been worthwhile.