News Physics

Soft crystal shows off its many new facets

By Peter Weiss

- More than 2 years ago

A beautifully faceted diamond may be forever, but there are many types of facets in crystals that, until now, seemed to be never.

On the surface of a liquid crystal droplet, the smaller facets outside the central hexagon have shallow orientations only recently observed. Pawel Pieranski/Université-Sud

In most chunks of crystalline material, facets correspond to a few, highly favored planes within the lattice of atoms.