Related papers: The Mesoscale Crystallinity of Nacreous Pearls
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…
Nacre, commonly known as mother-of-pearl, is a remarkable biomineral that in red abalone consists of layers of 400-nm thick aragonite crystalline tablets confined by organic matrix sheets, with the $(001)$ crystal axes of the aragonite…
Red abalone nacre is an intensely studied biomineral, and yet its formation mechanism remains poorly understood. Here we report quantitative measurements probing the degree of order of the aragonite tablets in nacre, and show that order…
Pearls, the most flawless and highly prized of them, are perhaps the most perfectly spherical macroscopic bodies in the biological world. How are they so round? Why are other pearls solids of revolution (off-round, drop, ringed), and yet…
We investigate the flow of a nano-scale incompressible ridge of low-volatility liquid along a "chemical channel": a long, straight, and completely wetting stripe embedded in a planar substrate, and sandwiched between two extended less…
Mesocrystals are nanostructured materials consisting of individual nanocrystals having a preferred crystallographic orientation. On mesoscopic length scales, the properties of mesocrystals are strongly affected by structural heterogeneity.…
The structures of free-standing zirconium nanowires with 0.6$-$2.8 nm in diameter are systematically studied by using genetic algorithm simulations with a tight-binding many body potential. Several multi-shell growth sequences with…
The scaling of friction with the contact size $A$ and (in)commensurabilty of nanoscopic and mesoscopic crystals on a regular substrate are investigated analytically for triangular nanocrystals on hexagonal substrates. The crystals are…
We confirm with high-resolution techniques the existence of mineral bridges between superposed nacre tablets. In the towered nacre of both gastropods and the cephalopod Nautilus there are large bridges aligned along the tower axes,…
Longitudinal contact-based vibrations of colloidal crystals with a controlled layer thickness are studied. These crystals consist of 390 nm diameter polystyrene spheres arranged into close packed, ordered lattices with a thickness of one to…
A layer of monodisperse circular steel disks in a nearly square horizontal cell forms, for shear amplitudes SA $\le$ 0.08, hexagonal close-packed crystallites that grow and merge until a single crystal fills the container. Increasing the…
Gradual disruption of the actin cytoskeleton induces a series of structural shape changes in cells leading to a transformation of cylindrical cell extensions into a periodic chain of "pearls". Quantitative measurements of the pearling…
The combination of soft nanoscale organic components with inorganic nanograins hierarchically designed by natural organisms results in highly ductile structural materials that can withstand mechanical impact and exhibit high resilience on…
The transfer of chirality across length-scales is an intriguing and universal natural phenomenon. However, connecting the properties of individual building blocks to the emergent features of their resulting large-scale structure remains a…
A spacetime crystal is a phase of matter that spontaneously develops periodic order in both space and time. Spacetime crystals have been experimentally observed in microscopic quantum many-body systems and, very recently, in a mesoscopic…
Quasicrystals are unique materials characterized by long-range order without periodicity. They are observed in systems such as metallic alloys, soft matter, and particle simulations. Unlike periodic crystals, which are invariant under…
Impurities in crystalline materials introduce disorder into an otherwise ordered structure due to the formation of lattice defects and grain boundaries. The properties of the resulting polycrystal can differ remarkably from those of the…
Metallic nanowires can exhibit fascinating physical properties. These unique properties often originate primarily from the quantum confinement of free electrons in a potential well, while electron-electron interactions do not play a…
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…
Intricate biomineralization processes in molluscs engineer hierarchical structures with meso-, nano-, and atomic architectures that give the final composite material exceptional mechanical strength and optical iridescence on the macroscale.…