page_title: Icosahedral twins
hierarchical_section_title: Icosahedral twins
caption_attribution_description: English: Electron microscope image (STEM-HAADF) of a gold nanoparticle showing 5-fold twinning. Microscope: Jeol, 200 kV, 3rd-order aberration corrected (illumination beam only).
context_page_description: An icosahedral twin is a nanostructure appearing for atomic clusters. The these clusters are twenty-faced, made of ten interlinked dual-tetrahedron crystals, typically joined along triangular faces having three-fold symmetry. One can think of their formation as a kind of atom-scale self-assembly.
  A variety of nanostructures assume icosahedral form on size scales where surface forces eclipse those from the bulk. A twinned form of these nanostructures is sometimes found to occur e.g. in face-centered-cubic metal-atom clusters. This may occur when the building blocks beneath each of the 20 facets of an initially icosahedral cluster "make the case" for conversion to a translationally symmetric crystalline form
context_section_description: An icosahedral twin is a nanostructure appearing for atomic clusters. The these clusters are twenty-faced, made of ten interlinked dual-tetrahedron (bowtie) crystals, typically joined along triangular (e.g. cubic-(111)) faces having three-fold symmetry. One can think of their formation as a kind of atom-scale self-assembly.
  A variety of nanostructures (e.g. condensing argon, metal atoms, and virus capsids) assume icosahedral form on size scales where surface forces eclipse those from the bulk. A twinned form of these nanostructures is sometimes found to occur e.g. in face-centered-cubic (FCC) metal-atom clusters. This may occur when the building blocks beneath each of the 20 facets of an initially icosahedral cluster (which cannot fill space without defects) "make the case" (as the surface-to-volume ratio of these facets decreases with size) for conversion to a translationally symmetric (e.g. defect-free face-centered-cubic) crystalline form
caption: Transmission electron microscopy image of a 5-fold twinned icosahedral Au nanoparticle.
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