Defects Enhance Stability in 12-fold Symmetric Soft-Matter Quasicrystals

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that rhombus-related defects increase the entropy and stability of 12-fold symmetric soft-matter quasicrystals, highlighting the importance of defects in their stabilization.

Contribution

We introduce a new lattice Monte Carlo simulation method with open boundaries to study defect effects on quasicrystal stability, revealing the stabilizing role of rhombus defects.

Findings

Rhombus defects significantly increase configurational entropy.

Defects enhance the stability of soft-matter quasicrystals.

Simulation results align with experimental observations.

Abstract

Quasicrystals are materials that exhibit long-range order without translational periodicity. In soft matter, the most commonly observed quasicrystal has 12-fold symmetry and consists of tilings made out of squares and triangles. Intriguingly, both in experiments and simulations, these tilings nearly always appear with many vacancy-related defects that are connected to an additional tile: a rhombus. In this letter, we explore the role of rhombus defects on the entropy of square-triangle 12-fold quasicrystals. We introduce a novel lattice-based Monte Carlo simulation method that uses open boundaries to allow the concentration of defects to fluctuate. Our simulations show that rhombus tiles significantly increase the configurational entropy of the quasicrystal phase, enhancing its stability. These findings highlight the critical role of defects in stabilizing soft-matter quasicrystals.