Icosahedral_twins
Icosahedral twins
Structure found in atomic clusters and nanoparticles
An icosahedral twin is a nanostructure appearing in atomic clusters and also nanoparticles with some thousands of atoms. These clusters are twenty-faced, with twenty interlinked tetrahedral crystals joined along triangular (e.g. cubic-(111)) faces having three-fold symmetry. A related, more common structure has five units similarly arranged with twinning, which were known as "fivelings" in the 19th century,[1][2][3] more recently as "decahedral multiply twinned particles", "pentagonal particles" or "star particles". A variety of different methods (e.g. condensing argon, metal atoms, and virus capsids) lead to the icosahedral form at size scales where surface energies are more important than those from the bulk.