Symmetry over time....a new crystal meme is born

cool bit of science...

Quote:

Physicists dream up crystal based on elegant satellite dance A crystal’s calling card is its regular, repeating pattern of unmoving atoms or molecules. But now a team of physicists have proposed a new kind of crystal that gets its order from the carefully composed movement of its components. Called choreographic crystals, these structures may look messy at any given moment, but display symmetric, repeating patterns if you watch them over time. “Because of the motion in the constituents, you can have a much higher symmetry than is visible in a snapshot,” says Latham Boyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Boyle came up with the idea while trying to design a future detector for gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that are proposed by Einstein’s general relativity but have not yet been detected, despite recent rumours. One possibility involves a trio of satellites that can detect small changes in the distances between them, which would be caused by a passing gravitational wave. The LISA Pathfinder satellite, launched last month, is a precursor to this sort of observatory. But because the three satellites always make a triangle, it takes time for them to sweep through space. You need at least four satellites to get an instant picture of the passing wave. “It seemed too futuristic to really work out in gory detail, but I couldn’t resist doing it for the simplest case,” Latham says. “I quickly realised that it was not at all obvious what the answer was.”

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via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1OyUTNX