Five-Fold Symmetry in Liquids
Entry by Emily Redston, AP 226, Fall 2012
Reference
Five-fold symmetry in liquids by F. Spaepen. Nature 408, 781-82 (2000)
Keywords
Summary
Even though liquids are essential ingredients in soft matter, researchers have only recently begun to understand their structure. Previous theories describing liquids as disordered crystals or as dense gases have fallen short. While there are still many unanswered questions, the current method is to explain the liquid structure as a dense packing of tetrahedral building blocks. Ideally one would like to have a method of describing the liquid structure as we already have for crystal structure. Unfortunately, since the atomic structure of a liquid changes over space and time, conventional scattering experiments using X-rays or electrons or neutrons can only provide directionally average information.
