Press Release 2010
The First Observation of a New Kind of Crystal Assembly: New Law of Togetherness
An exquisite natural phenomenon that polarity-induced assembly of crystals can occur was discovered. A ZnO rod has a positive and a negative polar end and in a concentric assembly, all rods grow along a single polar end, resulting in different properties. The same could be relevant to other materials too and lead to novel applications.

Figure 1. Image of the assemblies.

Figure 2. (a) Description of the two kinds of assembly. (b) Experimental image showing how light radiates from these assemblies. In one assembly, light comes out from tip, while in the other, it does not.
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Affiliations
Ujjal K. Gautama1, Masataka Imura1, Chandra Sekhar Routb2, Yoshio Bando1, Xiaosheng Fanga1, Benjamin Dierrec3, Leonid Sakharovd4, A. Govindarajb2, Takashi Sekiguchi5, Dmitri Golberg1, C. N. R. Raob2
- 1.International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (WPI-MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)
- 2.International Centre for Materials Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur P.O., Bangalore 560 064, India
- 3.Department of Physics, University of Trento, Via Sommarive 14, I-38050 Povo (Trento), Italy
- 4.L. Sakharov, LeoKrut, 34 Hamilton Road 310, Arlington, MA 02474
- 5.Advanced Electronic Materials Center, National Institute for Materials Science, Namiki 1-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan