Dodecagonal quasicrystals of oil-swollen ionic surfactant micelles
Ashish Jayaraman, Carlos Baez‐Cotto, Tyler J. Mann, Mahesh K. Mahanthappa
Abstract
Significance Quasicrystals, which exhibit local rotational symmetries and infinite unit cells, are intermediate states of matter between glasses and periodic three-dimensional (3D) crystals. Despite their ubiquity in metal alloys, self-assembled micellar quasicrystals have only serendipitously emerged from intricate molecular building blocks or complex materials-processing protocols. We demonstrate that hydration of a simple oil and surfactant (“soap”) mixture stimulates dodecagonal quasicrystalline ordering of oil-swollen spherical micelles, while oil addition to surfactant/water mixtures instead yields only periodic 3D crystals. Aperiodic order thus emerges as a scale-invariant feature of materials spanning metal alloys to self-assembled soft particles. The straightforward and path-dependent preparation of nonequilibrium quasicrystalline states from simple building blocks suggests that these complex sphere packings may often lurk in plain sight.