A materials scientist who discovered crystals with structures that many believed to be impossible -- and who stubbornly held his ground against fierce opposition -- has claimed this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Daniel Shechtman of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa was awarded the prize for his 1982 discovery of quasicrystals: materials with a mosaic-like, never-quite-repeating atomic structure that defied the textbooks of the time, existing only as mathematical curios. "It took an enormous amount of courage for Danny to stick to his claim," says Veit Elser, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.::::::::
Professor Daniel Shechtman, by AP/Photo and Ariel Schalit
It took two years for Shechtman to get his discovery published. His work was scorned by luminaries including double-Nobel-prizewinning chemist Linus Pauling, but after it was published, other examples of the crystals flooded in from around the globe. In 2009, researchers reported finding the quasicrystal structure in an alloy of aluminium, copper and iron, acquired by an Italian museum in 1990 but reported to have come from 200-million-year-old rocks in the Koryak Mountains in Russia
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