Quasicrystals with Zometool

Yuan-Chia Fan (范原嘉), Hsin-Yu Ko(柯星宇) and Mu-Chieh Chang (張慕傑) made a beautiful quasicrystal consisting of two types of rhombohedra with zometool last Friday. They put this model in the main lobby of our chemistry department for the alumni reunion last Saturday.

In addition to the tiling approach to the quasicrystal, one also constructs it using the cluster approach. In this sense, the carbon onion we made before is also a quasicrystal.

Originally, we didn't order enough red sticks to connect different shells of this structure. So only a few red sticks are used to hold neighbored Goldberg polyhedra along one five-fold axis (z direction). We now have enough red sticks for all twelve (or six) 5-fold axes emanating from the central dodecahedron (Goldberg vector (1,0)). So libration motion of each shell is quenched.

Yuan-Chia, Hsin-Yu, and Mu-Chieh also designed a wonderful support around pentagon at the bottom to enhance the stability for the this six-layer Goldberg polyhedra.