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The Nobel prize for chemistry has gone to a single researche
The Nobel prize for chemistry has gone to a single researcher for his discovery of the structure of quasicrystals.
The new structural form was previously thought to be impossible and provoked controversy.
Daniel Shechtman, from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, will receive the entire 10m Swedish krona (£940,000) prize.
The Nobel prize in chemistry caps this year's science awards.
Professor David Phillips, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, called quasicrystals "quite beautiful".
He added: "Quasicrystals are a fascinating aspect of chemical and material science - crystals that break all the rules of being a crystal at all."
Dr Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science to convince others of what he had first seen in his lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington - formerly called the National Bureau of Standards - on an April morning in 1982.
For years, the researcher was "ridiculed" and "treated badly" by his peers, he recounts.
The Nobel laureate first created quasicrystals by rapidly cooling molten metals, such as aluminium and manganese, by squirting the mixture onto a cool surface.
By sending an electron wave through a molten metal "grate", the Israeli researcher was able to see how the wave was diffracted by the metals' atoms.
Under the microscope he observed that the new crystal was made up of perfectly ordered, but never repeating, units - a structure that is at odds with all other crystals that are regular and precisely repeating.
Dr Shechtman himself is said to have cried "Eyn chaya kazo", which translates from the Hebrew as "there can be no such creature".
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