1. Description of quasicrystals

1.1 Discovery of quasicrystals

Quasicrystals are a fine example of discovery by serendipity, a learned word that Americans love and that Louis Pasteur expressed more naturally when he said that "chance favors only prepared minds". Daniel Shechtman, a young teacher-researcher at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, was on sabbatical at the National Bureau of Standard (now NIST) near Washington, DC. He had received excellent training in metallurgy and crystallography. In particular, he was familiar with grain boundaries and the techniques for studying them by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). At that time, in the early 1980s, many research programs were devoted to lightening structures, for example to increase the efficiency of air transport. The natural choice was aluminum, whose mechanical...