Xian-You Liu, Xiao-Yun Yan, Yuchu Liu, Hang Qu, Yicong Wang, Jing Wang, Qing-Yun Guo, Huanyu Lei, Xing-Han Li, Fenggang Bian, Xiao-Yu Cao, Rui Zhang, Yu Wang, Mingjun Huang, Zhiwei Lin, E W Meijer, Takuzo Aida, Xian Kong, Stephen Z D Cheng
Soft building blocks, such as micelles, cells or soap bubbles, tend to adopt near-spherical geometry when densely packed together. As a result, their packing structures do not extend beyond those discovered in metallic glasses, quasicrystals and crystals. Here we report the emergence of two Frank-Kasper phases from the self-assembly of five-fold symmetric molecular pentagons. The μ phase, an important intermediate in superalloys, is indexed in soft matter, whereas the ϕ phase exhibits a structure distinct from known Frank-Kasper phases in metallic systems...
January 31, 2024: Nature Materials