What appears to be an impossibly complicated maze is actually quite simple. Two complicated mazes, intertwined but not touching, tell a different story.
Now imagine them on the nanoscale and made of soft crystals. Materials scientist Ned Thomas of Rice University's Brown School of Engineering has done more than imagine them - he and his lab have made and analyzed them, slice by nano slice.
Thomas and his team report in Nature their characterization of a soft-matter double gyroid. What they briefly thought would be a perfect double gyroid, its curving arrangement of nodes and rods repeating ad infinitum, was not to be. They found instead their hoped-for cubic construction was full of distortions.
A gyroid is a crystal based on triply periodic minimal surfaces, a geometry that allows its repeating form to spread out in three dimensions forever (or at least until constrained). They are sometimes found in nature; for instance, gyroids give butterfly wings their iridescence.
4 сен 2024
