| Nobel Matters |
Distinguished Prof. Dan Shechtman of Technion’s Faculty of Materials Engineering is the sole recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals, a new form of matter.
Quasicrystals possess remarkable crystallographic and physical properties, embodying a novel kind of crystalline order. Shechtman discovered quasiperiodic crystals in April 1982, while he was a visiting scholar at the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland, USA. He was the first to reveal the “icosahedral phase” in rapidly solidified aluminum transition metal alloys, which opened up the field of quasiperiodic crystals as an area of study in materials science.
At the time, most of his colleagues ridiculed Shechtman. He returned to Technion, where Dr Ilan Blech was the only colleague who not only believed in him but who agreed to cooperate with him. Blech was able to decipher Shechtman's experimental findings and offered an explanation, known as the Icosahedral Glass Model.
In November 1984, Physical Review Letters published Shechtman’s discovery in a scientific paper co-authored with three other scientists: Ilan Blech (Israel), Denis Gratias (France) and John Cahn (USA). Wider acclaim followed, mainly from physicists and mathematicians, and later from crystallographers.
More than 40 scientific books have since been dedicated to quasiperiodic crystals, and hundreds of materials are known to exist with the structure discovered by Shechtman. Furthermore, the International Union of Crystallography changed its basic definition of a crystal in light of Shechtman’s breakthrough.
Finally, nearly 30 years after his discovery and after numerous national and international prestigious accolades, Shechtman receives the ultimate scientific recognition for his work - the Nobel Prize.
On hearing the Nobel announcement, Shechtman said, “A good scientist is a scientist that is not sure 100 percent in what he reads in the textbooks.” Read more |
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