International Union of Crystallography

[Aperiodic 2012 logo]Aperiodic 2012 - International Conference on Aperiodic Crystals

held at the Hotel Cairns, Cairns, Australia from 2-7 September 2012

image2
image3
image4
image5
image6
A very successful Aperiodic 2012, the seventh International Conference on Aperiodic Crystals was recently held at the Hotel Cairns in Cairns, Australia from September 2 to 7 (see http://rsc.anu.edu.au/~perri/Aperiodic/Aperiodic_Home.html). The 111 delegates who attended from 23 different countries, including the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Prof. Dan Shechtman from Israel, enjoyed the tropical climate, the ambience of the Hotel Cairns, the conference excursion to Green Island as well as a very diverse and full conference program held over 5 full days. The organizers thank the IUCr Calendar Committee for funding support to enable 10 young post-graduate students and post-docs under 35 to attend the meeting. Aperiodic 2012 was organized under the auspices of the Commission on Aperiodic Crystals of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). It follows Aperiodic '94 (Les Diablerets, Switzerland), Aperiodic'97 (Alpe d'Huez, France), Aperiodic '2000 (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Aperiodic '03 (Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Aperiodic'06 (Zao, Japan) and Aperiodic '09 (Liverpool, U.K). The next conference in this series will be held in Prague in 2015. The 111 delegates were treated to 5 days of all things aperiodic and quasi-crystalline including a special celebratory Nobel lecture by Prof. Shechtman, three introductory tutorial lectures on all things aperiodic as well as a wide-ranging program covering a huge range of topics including the Mathematics underlying Aperiodic Order, Diffuse scattering and the dynamics of modulated structures, Quasicrystals and Approximants, Incommensurate and compositely modulated structures, Aperiodic tilings, magnetism and other physical properties of aperiodic structures, aperiodic order in biological, chemical and soft matter systems and the surface science of quasicrystals. The Proceedings of this meeting will be published by Springer in 2013. Two well-attended poster sessions were also held as well as an enjoyable conference excursion to Green Island.

Ray Withers and Siegbert Schmid (Conference co-chairs)