A GROUP of scientists in the UK and Switzerland have designed what they claim is the most difficult maze ever created.
The team, led by physicist Felix Flicker of the University of Bristol, generated routes called irregular repeating patterns.
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The resulting labyrinths describe a bizarre form of matter known as quasicrystals.
“When we looked at the shapes of the lines we built, we realized that they formed incredibly intricate mazes,” Flicker said. explained in a press release.
“The sizes of subsequent mazes grow exponentially – and there are an infinite number of them.”
The experiment was partially based on the Knight’s movement around a chessboard.
In what is known as the Knight’s tour, the piece visits each square on the chessboard only once before returning to the starting square.
This is known as a “Hamiltonian path,” which traverses a graph and touches each vertex exactly once.
Physicists have built infinite, ever-increasing Hamiltonian paths into irregular structures that describe matter known as quasicrystals.
As far as their structure is concerned, quasicrystals are somewhere between glass and regularly ordered crystals such as salt or quartz.
To return to the chess analogy, quasicrystal atoms occur in asymmetrical, irregularly repeating patterns, unlike a chessboard.
They are also extremely difficult to find. Only three natural quasicrystals have been found, all in the same meteorite.
Hamiltonian paths form complex mazes with a clear starting point and exit – and although they may seem complicated, they are quite easy to solve.
But, in addition to being a form of entertainment, Flicker believes that Hamiltonian cycles could have “practical purposes covering different domains of science”.
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The experiment results also show that quasicrystals can be efficient adsorbents.
The term describes the ability of solid substances to attract molecules or gases from solutions they touch to their surface.
One application of adsorption is carbon capture and storage, in which carbon dioxide molecules are prevented from entering the atmosphere.
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“Our work also shows that quasicrystals can be better than crystals for some adsorption applications,” said co-author Shobha Singh, PhD researcher in Physics at Cardiff University.
“For example, flexible molecules will find more ways to land on the irregularly arranged atoms of quasicrystals. Quasicrystals are also brittle, meaning they break easily into tiny grains. This maximizes their surface area for adsorption.”
Efficient adsorption could also make quasicrystals excellent candidates for catalysts – substances that reduce the energy needed to trigger a chemical reaction.
One possible application is the production of ammonia fertilizer used in agriculture.
What is a quasicrystal?
Quasicrystals may appear symmetrical – but they are actually made up of irregularly repeating patterns.
Quasicrystals are a form of matter with ordered but non-periodic atoms.
This means that your pattern expands to fill all available space, but is not symmetrical.
Matter is structurally somewhere between glasses, known as amorphous solids, and crystals, which are made of neat, orderly patterns.
Quasicrystals appear to be formed from two different structures assembled in a non-repeating arrangement,
They rarely occur naturally – three were found in a meteorite that fell in Russia’s Khatyrka region in 2011.
The third and most recent specimen was found in 2016 and was just a few micrometers wide.
It was discovered by a team of geologists led by Luca Bindi of the University of Florence in Italy.
Quasicrystals were also created artificially – notably, during the detonation of the first atomic bomb during the Trinity Test in 1945.
The temperature and pressure of the explosion fused the surrounding sand into a glassy material called trinitite.
In May 2021, scientists discovered a quasicrystal in a sample of trinitite.
This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
