Pinwheel patterns and powder diffraction

Abstract

Pinwheel patterns and their higher dimensional generalisations display continuous circular or spherical symmetries in spite of being perfectly ordered. The same symmetries show up in the corresponding diffraction images. Interestingly, they also arise from amorphous systems, and also from regular crystals when investigated by powder diffraction. We present first steps and results towards a general frame to investigate such systems, with emphasis on statistical properties that are helpful to understand and compare the diffraction images. We concentrate on properties that are accessible via an alternative substitution rule for the pinwheel tiling, based on two different prototiles. Due to striking similarities, we compare our results with the toy model for the powder diffraction of the square lattice.