In the 1980s, a new type of material was discovered. It upended the definition of a crystalline material because its atoms were arranged in a strange, non-repeating manner that was also not entirely chaotic. Such a pattern hadn’t yet been observed at the time, and won its discoverer Dan Shechtman a Nobel Prize in 2011. These materials have been called quasicrystals. In the last three decades, they have been found to have unique but not unusual properties – that is, until earlier this year.
In January, Japanese researchers reported that an alloy of three metals becomes a superconductor when cooled to an extremely low temperature. The alloy is a quasicrystal. As a result, for the first time, scientists have established that superconductivity occurs in all three broad types of solids, the other two being crystals and amorphous solids.
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