What periodicities can be found in diffraction patterns of quasicrystals?
Janusz Wolny1, Bartlomiej Kozakowski1, Pawel Kuczera1
1Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, al. Mickiewicza 30, Krakow, 30-059, Poland.
Abstract:
The structure of quasicrystals is aperiodic. Their diffraction patterns, however, can be considered periodic. They are composed solely of series of peaks which exhibit a fully periodic arrangement in reciprocal space. Furthermore, the peak intensities in each series define the so-called `envelope function'. A Fourier transform of the envelope function gives an average unit cell, whose definition is based on the statistical distribution of atomic coordinates in physical space. If such a distribution is lifted to higher-dimensional space, it becomes the so-called atomic surface - the most fundamental feature of higher-dimensional analysis.
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