A GROUP of scientists in the UK and Switzerland have devised what they claim is the most difficult maze ever created.
A team led by physicist Felix Flicker of the University of Bristol generated the paths, called irregularly repeating patterns.
The resulting mazes describe a bizarre form of matter known as quasi-crystals.
“When we looked at the line shapes we built, we noticed that they formed incredibly complex mazes,” Flicker explained in a press release.
“The sizes of the subsequent mazes grow exponentially – and there are an infinite number of them.”
The experiment was partly based on the movement of the knight around the chessboard.
In the so-called knight’s move, the piece visits each square of the board only once before returning to its starting square.
This is known as a “Hamiltonian path”, which traverses the graph and touches each vertex exactly once.
Physicists have constructed infinite and ever-growing Hamiltonian paths in irregular structures that describe matter known as quasicrystals.
In terms of their structure, quasicrystals are somewhere between glass and regularly ordered crystals such as salt or quartz.
To return to the chess analogy, quasi-crystal atoms, unlike a checkerboard, occur in irregularly repeating and asymmetric patterns.
They are also very hard to come by. Only three natural quasi-crystals have been found, all in the same meteorite.
Hamiltonian paths are complex mazes with a clear starting point and exit – and although they may look complicated, they are relatively easy to solve.
But beyond being a form of entertainment, Flicker believes that Hamiltonian cycles could have “practical purposes spanning various fields of science.”
The results of the experiment also show that quasicrystals can be effective adsorbers.
The term describes the ability of solids to attract molecules or gases of solutions they touch to their surface.
One application of adsorption is carbon capture and storage, which prevents carbon dioxide molecules from entering the atmosphere.
“Our work also shows that quasicrystals can be better than crystals for some adsorption applications,” said co-author Shobha Singh, a PhD researcher in physics at Cardiff University.
“For example, bending molecules find more ways to land on the irregularly arranged atoms of quasicrystals. Quasicrystals are also brittle, which means they break easily into tiny grains. This maximizes their surface area for adsorption.”
Efficient adsorption could also make quasicrystals excellent candidates for catalysts—substances that reduce the energy required to initiate a chemical reaction.
One possible application is the production of ammonia fertilizer used in agriculture.
What is a quasi-crystal?
Quasicrystals may look symmetrical – but they are actually made up of irregularly repeating patterns.
Quasicrystals are a form of matter with atoms that are ordered but not periodic.
This means that their pattern will expand to fill all the available space, but it is not symmetrical.
Matter is structurally somewhere between glass, which is known as an amorphous solid, and crystals, which are made up of neat and ordered patterns.
Quasicrystals appear to be made up of two different structures assembled into a non-repeating array,
They rarely occur naturally – three were found in a meteorite that landed in Russia’s Khatyrka region in 2011.
The third and most recent specimen was found in 2016 and was only a few micrometers wide.
It was discovered by a team of geologists led by Luca Bindi from the University of Florence in Italy.
Quasi-crystals have also been created artificially – notably during the detonation of the first atomic bomb during the Trinity Test in 1945.
The temperature and pressure of the explosion melted the surrounding sand into a glassy material called trinitite.
In May 2021, scientists discovered a quasi-crystal in one sample of trinitite.