Scientifically speaking, the term “crystal” refers to any solid that has an ordered chemical structure. This means that its parts are arranged in a precisely ordered pattern, like bricks in a wall.

The advantages of cheaper, faster and more precise crystal formation are clear to see. Crystals are used everywhere, from ...

Scientists have succeeded in visualizing crystal nucleation -- the stage that precedes crystallization -- that was invisible until now. At the interface between chemistry and physics, the process of ...

Crystals—from sugar and table salt to snowflakes and diamonds—don't always grow in a straightforward way. New York University researchers have captured this journey from amorphous blob to orderly ...

Physicists at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg have discovered a striking ...

Researchers in Vienna have discovered something remarkable: crystals that don’t form in space, like diamonds or salt, but in time itself. Instead of atoms arranging neatly into repeating patterns, ...

New studies of the “platypus of materials” help explain how their atoms arrange themselves into orderly, but nonrepeating, patterns.

At the interface between chemistry and physics, the process of crystallization is omnipresent in nature and industry. It is the basis for the formation of snowflakes but also of certain active ...

In exploring how crystals form, the researchers also came across an unusual, rod-shaped crystal that hadn’t been identified before, naming it “Zangenite” for the NYU graduate student who discovered it ...