Unveiling quasiperiodicity through nonlinear wave mixing in periodic media

Quasiperiodicity is the concept of order without translation symmetry. The discovery of quasiperiodic order in natural materials transformed the way scientists examine and define ordered structure. We show and verify experimentally that quasiperiodicity can be observed by scattering processes from a periodic structure, provided the interaction area is of finite width. This is made through a momentum conservation condition, physically realizing a geometrical method used to model quasiperiodic structures by projecting a periodic structure of a higher dimension.