The Atomic Regular Polyhedron Electronic Shell

Electronic and atomic shell structure in aluminium nanowires.

We report experiments on aluminium nanowires in ultra-high vacuum at room temperature that reveal a periodic spectrum of exceptionally stable structures. Two 'magic' series of stable structures are observed: at low conductance, the formation of stable nanowires is governed by electronic shell effects whereas for larger contacts atomic packing dominates. The crossover between the two regimes is ...

Aesthetic Patterns with Symmetries of the Regular Polyhedron

A fast algorithm is established to transform points of the unit sphere into fundamental region symmetrically. With the resulting algorithm, a flexible form of invariant mappings is achieved to generate aesthetic patterns with symmetries of the regular polyhedra.

Crossover from electronic to atomic shell structure in alkali metal nanowires.

After making a cold weld by pressing two clean metal surfaces together, upon gradually separating the two pieces a metallic nanowire is formed, which progressively thins down to a single atom before contact is lost. In previous experiments we have observed that the stability of such nanowires is influenced by electronic shell filling effects, in analogy to shell effects in metal clusters. For s...

Atomic Inner-shell Threshold Excitation Phenomena

Atomic-level models of the bacterial carboxysome shell.

The carboxysome is a bacterial microcompartment that functions as a simple organelle by sequestering enzymes involved in carbon fixation. The carboxysome shell is roughly 800 to 1400 angstroms in diameter and is assembled from several thousand protein subunits. Previous studies have revealed the three-dimensional structures of hexameric carboxysome shell proteins, which self-assemble into molec...