Dan Shechtman. File photo by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2011Nobel Prizes
Technion's Dan Shechtman wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering quasicrystals.
The prize announced on 5 October 2011 comes 29 years after an image that was thought impossible appeared in his electron microscope.
The story in numbers.
10years
from the discovery to a new definition of a crystal
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29years
from the discovery to the prize
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Here is how it happened.
8 April 1982
An image that should be impossible appears in his electron microscope.
He studies a rapidly cooled alloy of aluminium and manganese at NIST in the United States. He sees rings of ten bright dots each, and tells himself in Hebrew that there can be no such creature.
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1983 to 1984
A journal refuses his first article straight away.
In 1983 Ilan Blech of the Technion becomes interested and helps him interpret the pattern. The article goes to the Journal of Applied Physics in the summer of 1984 and comes back refused.
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Shechtman, left, explains the atomic structure to collaborators at NIST in 1985. File photo by Phillip Westcott, National Institute of Standards and Technology, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
November 1984
Physical Review Letters publishes the discovery.
Shechtman, Blech, Denis Gratias and John Cahn sign the article. It questions a basic truth of crystal science, that all crystals consist of repeating patterns.
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1984 to 1992
The discovery meets resistance until crystallographers change their definition.
While he defends his findings, Shechtman is asked to leave his research group. In 1992 the International Union of Crystallography widens its definition of a crystal to any solid with an essentially discrete diffraction diagram.
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Summer 2009
Scientists report natural quasicrystals in mineral samples from a Russian river.
The new mineral, icosahedrite, consists of aluminium, copper and iron. Its diffraction pattern shows the same tenfold symmetry.
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Shechtman at the Nobel press conference in Stockholm. File photo by Holger Motzkau, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
5 October 2011
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the prize.
It goes to Shechtman alone, born in Tel Aviv in 1941, for the discovery of quasicrystals. He earned his doctorate at the Technion in 1972.
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Here is why it matters.
Quasicrystals are solids whose atoms form regular patterns that never repeat, which scientists believed could not happen. The Nobel announcement says the discovery fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.
Three more milestones to read next.
Ada Yonath. File photo by Miki Koren, Weizmann Institute of Science, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2009
Weizmann Institute's Ada Yonath wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Aaron Ciechanover. File photo by Bengt Oberger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2004
Technion's Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Arieh Warshel in December 2013. File photo by Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2013
Kibbutz-born Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Where each fact was read.
Sources read on 1 November 2026.