Novel Experimental Techniques and Realizations of Quasi-Periodicity

Abstract

Although there has been a great deal of recent activity on possible structures and some of the static properties of quasi-periodic and quasi-crystalline phases, some fundamental questions still remain about the dynamics, possibilities of commensurability and pinning, and the nature of the states for such systems. Since three dimensional realizations of such structures, with sufficient perfection and characterization to allow meaningful studies, are not yet available, we describe some experiments on artificial two-dimensional structures which answer some of these questions experimentally. The main results are attained on superconducting networks, where the application of a magnetic field allows us to see the generalization of commensurability pinning for a variety of quasi-crystalline, quasi-periodic and disordered structures.