Superfluid Quasicrystals

Condensed matter physics is so cool! Bounce 4 laser beams off mirrors to make an interference pattern with 8-fold symmetry. Put a Bose–Einstein condensate of potassium atoms into this “optical lattice” and you get a superfluid quasicrystal!

[image error]

You see, no periodic pattern in the plane can have 8-fold symmetry, so the interference pattern of the light is ‘quasiperiodic’: it never repeats itself, thought it comes arbitrarily close, sort of like this pattern drawn by Greg Egan:

[image error]

In the Bose–...