直到丹尼尔·舍特曼的发现提出之前，化学家曾一直将晶体定义为原子按照可重复的规则模式进行排列的材料。然而，在1982年，以色列理工大学材料科学家舍特曼发现，一种铝和锰的合金，其原子按常规顺序排列，但是不能重复。
此类“准晶体”迫使化学家重新编写了他们的教科书。最终，2011年舍特曼因准晶体的发现获得诺贝尔化学奖。自从发现准晶体后，科学家也在自然界中发现了准晶体，而且工程师制造出多种多样的准晶体，并将它们用于从刀片到不粘锅涂料等各种产品中。
现在，德国研究人员想出一种“栽培”超薄准晶体薄膜的新方法。正如他们近日于《自然》杂志在线报道的那样，他们将一个钛酸钡（BaTiO3）薄膜层放置在六方晶格排列的铂原子表面上。一般而言，BaTiO3原子会被排列成立方体形状。但是，两个层次间原子排列的不协调，迫使BaTiO3将自己的原子排列成12面体。
如图所示，这个12面体的外环呈浅色。在内部，原子按照三角形、正方形和菱形进行排列。研究人员表示，这种制造准晶体的新方法可能带来目前未曾被使用过的更多准晶体品种。(生物谷：Bioon.com)
生物谷推荐的英文摘要
Natute doi:10.1038/nature12514
Quasicrystalline structure formation in a classical crystalline thin-film system
Stefan Forster,Klaus Meinel,René Hammer,Martin Trautmann& Wolf Widdra
The discovery of quasicrystals1—crystalline structures that show order while lacking periodicity—forced a paradigm shift in crystallography. Initially limited to intermetallic systems1, 2, 3, 4, the observation of quasicrystalline structures has recently expanded to include ‘soft’ quasicrystals in the fields of colloidal and supermolecular chemistry5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Here we report an aperiodic oxide that grows as a two-dimensional quasicrystal on a periodic single-element substrate. On a Pt(111) substrate with 3-fold symmetry, the perovskite barium titanate BaTiO3 forms a high-temperature interface-driven structure with 12-fold symmetry. The building blocks of this dodecagonal structure assemble with the theoretically predicted Stampfli–G?hler tiling10, 11 having a fundamental length-scale of 0.69?nm. This example of interface-driven formation of ultrathin quasicrystals from a typical periodic perovskite oxide potentially extends the quasicrystal concept to a broader range of materials. In addition, it demonstrates that frustration at the interface between two periodic materials can drive a thin film into an aperiodic quasicrystalline phase, as proposed previously12. Such structures might also find use as ultrathin buffer layers for the accommodation of large lattice mismatches in conventional epitaxy13.
