Introducing a diabolical way to frustrate matter. We design colloidal building blocks that assemble into five-membered rings, which in turn form face-sharing dodecahedral cages. These structures possess icosahedral symmetry, which prevents long-range order. Unlike typical frustrated glasses that get stuck kinetically, this design nucleates a new disordered phase. The resulting structure represents an intermediate state of matter: it lacks long-range translational order (so it’s not crystalline) and orientational order (so it’s not quasicrystalline), yet it exhibits medium-range order and arrested dynamics. Crucially, it forms via nucleation and growth, rather than by supercooling, a key distinction from conventional glasses. Experiments using DNA origami to implement this design are currently underway.
Hell might not freeze over, but our pentagonal design surely does.

A. Neophytou, F. Sciortino, J. Russo

Adv. Mat., https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202502136