There may be more kinds of stuff than we thought. A team of
researchers has reported possible evidence for a new category of solids, things
that are neither pure glasses, crystals, nor even exotic quasicrystals.
Something else.
"Very weird. Strangest material I ever saw," says
materials physicist Lyle Levine of the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST).
The research team from NIST, Argonne National Laboratory,
France's Centre d'Élaboration de Matériaux et d'Études Structurales (CNRS) and
the University of Washington have analyzed a solid alloy that they discovered
in small discrete patches of a rapidly cooled mixture of aluminum, iron and
silicon. The material appears to have none of the ordering of atoms found in
crystals, which would make it a glass, except that it has a very defined
composition and grows outward from "seeds"—things that glasses most
assuredly do not do.