Related papers: Narrowly distributed crystal orientation in biomin…
The hardest materials in living organisms are biologically grown crystalline minerals, or biominerals, which are also incredibly fracture-tough. Biomineral mesostructure includes size, shape, spatial arrangement, and crystal orientation of…
Metastable vaterite crystals were synthesized by increasing the pH and consequently the saturation states of Ca and CO3 containing solutions using an ammonia diffusion method. SEM and TEM analyses indicate that vaterite grains produced by…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
Nacre is a layered, iridescent lining found inside many mollusk shells, with a unique brick-and-mortar periodic structure at the sub-micron scale, and remarkable resistance to fracture. Despite extensive studies, it remains unclear how…
Organic molecular crystals encompass a vast range of materials from pharmaceuticals to organic optoelectronics and proteins to waxes in biological and industrial settings. Crystal defects from grain boundaries to dislocations are known to…
Structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids are explored using a nonlinear hydrodynamic theory of crystallization proposed recently [G. I. Toth et al., J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 26, 055001 (2014)], which is based on…
Non-cubic crystals exhibit anisotropic physical and functional properties. Microscopic crystallites as constituents of polycrystalline materials are randomly oriented, thus polycrystalline ceramics lack the anisotropic properties of their…
Calcium carbonate (CaCO3), the most abundant biogenic mineral on earth, plays a crucial role in various fields. Of the four polymorphs, calcite, aragonite, vaterite, and amorphous CaCO3, vaterite is the most enigmatic one due to an ongoing…
Biominerals such as seashells, corals skeletons, bone, and enamel are optically anisotropic crystalline materials with unique nano- and micro-scale organization that translates into exceptional macroscopic mechanical properties, providing…
Quasicrystals exhibit long-range order but lack translational symmetry. When grown as single crystals, they possess distinctive and unusual properties owing to the absence of grain boundaries. Unfortunately, conventional methods such as…
Biotite crystals are phyllosilicate trioctahedral micas with the general chemical formula K(Mg,Fe)3AlSi3O10(OH)2 that form a solid-solution series with iron-poor phlogopite and iron-rich annite endmembers. With a wide band gap energy and a…
We report on the observation of self-organized stripe-like structures on the as-grown surface and in the bulk of (Nd,Eu,Gd)Ba$_2$Cu$_3$O$_y$ single crystals. The periodicity of the stripes on the surface lies between 500 and 800 nm. These…
Biomineralizing organisms are widely noted and extensively studied due to their ability to generate structures exhibiting exceptional crystallographic control. Primarily, it is the organisms, such as sea-urchins or bivalves, that generate…
Crystals in nature often demonstrate curved morphologies rather than classical faceted surfaces. Inspired by biogenic curved single crystals, we demonstrate that gold single crystals exhibiting curved surfaces can be grown with no need of…
We report on the growth of single-crystal potassium birnessite (K0.31MnO2*0.41H2O) and present both the average and local structural characterization of this frustrated magnetic system. Single crystals were obtained employing a flux growth…
To explore the role of the olivine grain size and crystal preferred orientation (CPO) on the evolution of the microstructure and the mechanical behaviour of upper mantle rocks up to large strains, we performed axial extension experiments at…
Ice growth has attracted great attention for its capability of fabricating hierarchically porous microstructure. However, the formation of tilted lamellar microstructure during freezing needs to be reconsidered due to the limited control of…
Unlike conventional epitaxy, van der Waals epitaxy (vdWE) allows nearly stress-free growth of thick films with highly oriented crystals without dislocations even for large film-substrate lattice mismatches. Despite reports of vdWE in…
We investigate the irregular eutectic growth dynamics of the Al-Al3Ni alloy, in which one of the solid phases (Al3Ni) grows faceted from the liquid. Leveraging in situ optical microscopy and synchrotron transmission x-ray microscopy, we…
An optimization procedure determining the ideal configuration at the microstructural level of ferroelectric (FE) materials is applied to maximize piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity in ceramic FEs differ significantly from that of single…