Pingie: HTTP:: Physicists Struggle to Understand Crystals

HTTP:: Physicists Struggle to Understand Crystals
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The beautiful depth that crystals have is one of the things that have fascinated people since the early days of civilization. Fortune tellers use it to scout the future, while some believe that the stones channel mystical powers, which can be harnessed for various purposes. But scientists have no ambition of learning if that is true or not, for now. Rather, they are concerned about more basic questions, such as why exactly are crystals the way they are. Although it may seem a bit redundant, this simple question still has physicists scratching their heads, and no clear answers are yet in sight, NewScientist reports. The underlying issue here is why atoms prefer coming together under a structure rather than the other. Experts cannot yet determine how a crystal will be structured and infer its properties from its atomic arrangement. University College London (UCL) expert Chris Pickard believes, however, that he may have found a way of predicting crystals' structures. It took!
many years of dedication for this, with his first studies taking place as a young PhD student at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. At the time, he used a program called CASTEP, designed by his supervisor, Mike Payne. He relied on the fact that, naturally, all atoms tended to arrange themselves in a low-energy structure....
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http://news.softpedia.com/news/Physicists-Struggle-to-Understand-Crystals-124531.shtml
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