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Lightning Strikes Create a Strange Form of Crystal Rarely Seen in Nature - ScienceAlert

Lightning Strikes Create a Strange Form of Crystal Rarely Seen in Nature - ScienceAlert

Lightning Strikes Create a Strange Form of Crystal Rarely Seen in Nature - ScienceAlert
Jan 30, 2023 57 secs

The violent fingers of electricity that struck a sand dune in Nebraska have left behind a configuration of crystal rarely found in nature.

Inside a piece of fulgurite – or 'fossilized lightning' – created by a powerful bolt of electricity traveling into and fusing sand, scientists have found a quasicrystal, an arrangement of matter once thought to be impossible.

"The current investigation was designed to explore a different possible nature-inspired mechanism for generating quasicrystals: electrical discharge," write a team of researchers led by geologist Luca Bindi of the University of Florence in Italy in their paper.

(Bindi et al., PNAS, 2022)Most crystalline solids in nature, from the humble table salt to the toughest diamonds, follow the same pattern: their atoms are arranged in a lattice structure that repeats in three-dimensional space.

Then Bindi and his colleague, physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, along with their team, found a quasicrystal forged during a nuclear bomb test in 1945.

"The discovery of a dodecagonal quasicrystal formed by a lightning strike or downed power line suggests that electric discharge experiments may be another approach to be added to our arsenal of synthesis methods," they write in their paper.

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