Dodecagonal spherical quasicrystals

Abstract

We argue that 2D dodecagonal spherical quasicrystalls (QCs) will be discovered in the nearest future and investigate how the planar QC order becomes compatible with the spherical geometry. We show that the appearance of curvature-induced topological defects and low-energy structural rearrangements are sufficient to obtain the regular spherical QC structures. Minimization of total energy required for the order reconstruction determines the number of topological defects, which are located near the vertices of snub cub or icosahedron in dependence on type of the initial dodecagonal order.