Averaged shelling for quasicrystals

Abstract

The shelling of crystals is concerned with counting the number of atoms on spherical shells of a given radius and a fixed centre. Its straight-forward generalization to quasicrystals, the so-called central shelling, leads to non-universal answers. As one way to cope with this situation, we consider shelling averages over all quasicrystal points. We express the averaged shelling numbers in terms of the autocorrelation coefficients and give explicit results for the usual suspects, both perfect and random.