A New Algorithm Just Simulated a 268-Million-Site Quasicrystal

Quasicrystals occupy a strange middle ground in mineralogy: ordered enough to diffract light and X-rays like a true crystal, but arranged in patterns that never quite repeat — a structure once thought to be mathematically impossible until they were discovered in the lab in the 1980s, and later found occurring naturally in a meteorite. That combination of order-without-repetition makes quasicrystals notoriously difficult to simulate computationally; the math scales up fast.

In April 2026, a team at Aalto University's Department of Applied Physics, led by Assistant Professor Jose Lado, published a breakthrough in Physical Review Letters: a quantum-inspired algorithm using "tensor networks" that successfully simulated a topological quasicrystal system with over 268 million sites — a scale that exceeds what conventional supercomputers can practically handle. Doctoral researcher Tiago Antão led the work alongside researchers Yitao Sun and Adolfo Fumega.

Quasicrystals are already useful in the everyday world — their unusual atomic structure makes them hard, low-friction, and poor conductors of heat and electricity, properties that show up in things like non-stick cookware and surgical instruments. The bigger prize researchers are chasing is quasicrystals' potential role in quantum computing, where their exotic structure may help stabilize "topological qubits" — a proposed approach to quantum computing that could be significantly more resistant to errors than current methods.

Source: Phys.org, April 2026, reporting on research published in Physical Review Letters.