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ALCHEMY. “Once a mesocrystal is formed, it can be transformed to a mesocrystal of another mineral system by topotactic conversion under favorable conditions. The term topotaxy (Greek; "topos" = "space" and "taxis" = "in ordered manner") describes all solid state reactions that lead to a material with crystal orientations, which are correlated with crystal orientations in the initial product.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

MINIMAL ENERGY STATES. “The driving force for the geometrical alignment is the minimization of the interface mismatch energy by forming a coherent interface and reducing the exposed surface area while edge sharing is promoted by reduction of the amount of dangling unsaturated bonds along the edge, which have an inherently high chemical energy.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

GEOMETRIC CONSTRAINTS. “The fourth possibility for the formation of a mesocrystal would be a simple geometric argument. When crystalline nanoparticles grow and these nanoparticles are not spherical in shape, simple entropic arguments (known from the Onsager theory of liquid crystallinity) can explain their alignment in a constrained reaction environment upon particle growth.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

MINERAL BRIDGES. “An assembly of mineral bridge connected crystals is in fact also a single crystal. Thus, this concept is the most straightforward one among the mesocrystal formation mechanisms to explain the mutual crystallographic orientation of the nanocrystal.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

EXQUISITE REASONING. “The symmetry of a sharp edge is not obvious.” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/JHEP07(2019)140.pdf View in LinkedIn

LEGO BLOCKS. “In analogy, a number of unit cells build the nanocrystal with potentially unusual shape and interaction pattern, which is the primary building unit in a nonclassical crystallization process.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

This beautiful woodcarving that I bought in Hong Kong many years ago gives the visual illusion of being carved from a single block of wood, but in reality some of the motifs were carved separately and seamlessly added. View in LinkedIn

THE CORRESPONDENCE. “The smallest regular unit in such a crystal is the unit cell, which corresponds to the secondary structure in biopolymers (a-helix, B-sheet, y-turn). The interaction between several secondary structural elements of biopolymers defines the tertiary structure.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn

REALITY IS FIELDS. “Over the past century, quantum field theory has proved to be the single most sweeping and successful physical theory ever invented. It can explain at a fundamental level literally every single experiment that we’ve ever done.” https://lnkd.in/em4Z3KGK View in LinkedIn

SITEMAP. “An important lesson from the multilevel structure formation in biopolymers is the coding of the structural organization process by chemical functionalities, which is for example the amino acid sequence in proteins.” https://lnkd.in/eNACsghr View in LinkedIn