Israeli Chemist Wins Nobel Prize For Quasicrystals

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Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.

The 1982 breakthrough fundamentally changed the way chemists look at solid matter, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Scientists used to believe that atoms were arranged inside crystals only in ordered, repeating patterns. Shechtman's work showed that the atoms could be packed in a pattern that did not repeat — a new chemical structure known as a quasicrystal.

NPR's Joe Palca said Shechtman was in the U.S. studying a mixture of aluminum and manganese through an electron microscope when he made the discovery. The microscope allowed him to see how the atoms in the compound were packed together — but the pattern didn't make sense because it seemed to violate the rules of nature by not repeating.

"This was such a fundamental change in what people understood about crystals that it just seemed impossible," Palca said. "So he sent in a paper to a scientific journal, and they basically sent it right back without even ... looking at it at all. But he knew he had something very weird."

All crystals were thought to have rotational symmetry, so that when they are rotated, they look the same. On April 8, 1982, Shechtman first observed crystals with 10 points — pentagonal symmetry, which most scientists said was impossible.

"I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me," Shechtman said in a description of his work released by his university.

It took years for Shechtman and other researchers to prove that he was right, and he was asked to leave his research group in the course of defending his findings.

Even double Nobel winner Linus Pauling was among those who never accepted the research.

"He would stand on those platforms and declare, 'Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists,' " said Shechtman, a professor of materials science at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

The type of nonrepeating patterns that follow mathematical rules seen in quasicrystals are also seen in tile mosaics across the Arabic world, most notably in buildings such as the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam Shrine in Iran. Mosaics like these from as early the 13th century, made of just five unique tiles, "have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level," the academy said.

Quasicrystals have been synthesized in laboratories around the world since their discovery in 1982, but it wasn't until 2009 that the first naturally occurring quasicrystals were found.

They have also been found in some of the most durable kinds of steel in the world, and they are used in products such as razor blades and thin needles used in eye surgery. Scientists are also experimenting with using quasicrystals in surface coatings for frying pans, heat insulation in engines, and energy-saving LED lights.

Shechtman will receive the 10 million kroner ($1.5 million) prize in December.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this story.

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Nobel-Winning Chemist Fought Hard For Acceptance

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Previous audio and Web versions of this story stated that Daniel Shechtman's U.S. appointment was at the University of Iowa. Shechtman is actually at Iowa State University.

Enlarge H. Mark Helfer/NIST

Daniel Shechtman (left) discusses the quasicrystal's structure with collaborators in 1985, just months after shaking the foundations of materials science. Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

H. Mark Helfer/NIST

Daniel Shechtman (left) discusses the quasicrystal's structure with collaborators in 1985, just months after shaking the foundations of materials science. Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

If you or your mate shaved this morning with one of those thin-foil electric shavers, that face probably brushed up against a strange form of matter called a quasicrystal. Norelco is unlikely to get a Nobel Prize for that invention, but the man who discovered quasicrystals, Daniel Shechtman, will get this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry. And it didn't come easily.

Crystals, like diamonds and quartz, hold their sparkly allure because of the way the atoms inside those rocks line up so neatly.

"For 200 years, we had a pretty firm idea of what a crystal is," says Paul Steinhardt, a professor of physics at Princeton University. "It is a structure in which there is an atom or a group of atoms that repeats with regular spacing between the repeats."

Like floor tiles, Steinhardt says, there are some obvious rules about which geometry works and doesn't work to build a crystal. Squares and hexagons, sure. But try all you want and you'll never make a bathroom floor out of five-pointed stars.

Now, turn back the clock to April 8, 1982. An Israeli scientist named Daniel Shechtman was working on a U.S. Defense Department-funded project to search for unusual materials at what was then the National Bureau of Standards, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, near Washington, D.C. His electron microscope seemingly revealed a crystal built out of one of those impossible shapes.

"And I counted, and there were 10 spots. And I said, 'No, cannot be!' And I counted the other way — 10 spots. This cannot be!" Shechtman recalls.

Shechtman tells the story in an interview posted on the Web by the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. These days Shechtman splits his time between there and Iowa State University. He was convinced he was on to something big, but he says most people thought he'd simply made a huge blunder — including his lab chief back in Israel.

"That person expelled me from his group," Shechtman says. "He said, 'You are a disgrace to our group, and I cannot bear this disgrace.' And he asked me to leave the group. So I left the group. And he was a good friend of mine."

Rushing To Study Quasicrystals

For two years, Shechtman fought to prove it wasn't a mistake. But he couldn't get his findings published until finally he teamed up with some respected colleagues. At that point, a physics journal rushed it into print.

"Then hell broke loose, because it did interest the community, and many scientists from around the world started to work on these materials," Shechtman says. "And they called me from around the world: 'I have it, I have it, I have it, too!' "

His co-author, John Cahn from the Bureau of Standards lab, was part of that big rush.

"I dropped whatever else I was working on, and for the next five years, that's all I worked on," Cahn says.

Cahn says they saw 300 papers over the next year from people around the world. About the only place this research wasn't hot was the United States, because the grand old man of chemistry, Linus Pauling, thought it was nonsense and he discouraged anyone from looking into it.

Though Shechtman hadn't really figured out how to make the crystal equivalent of a floor of star-shaped tiles, he did discover another way to make a crystal. It didn't have that completely regular pattern you find in diamonds, but its elements repeated in a more subtle way. And this brings us back to Steinhardt at Princeton.

Back in 1984, he had been calculating unusual ways that atoms could pack together to form crystals, and at just that time, someone brought him the Shechtman paper with its bewildering pattern of atoms.

"Sitting on my desk was the pattern we had computed, and the two agreed beautifully. So it was a very exciting moment," Steinhardt says.

Steinhardt coined the term quasicrystal to describe this pattern. These man-made crystals have strange properties, like unusual hardness and slipperiness, so they can be used in shavers and certain nonstick frying pans.

Steinhardt expects this is just the beginning, since they have other properties, such as the ability to turn heat into electricity. And nearly 30 years after Shechtman's Nobel Prize-winning aha moment, the field is still in its infancy.

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