IF YOU squeeze tellurium hard enough, it forms an atomic structure so complex that it never repeats itself. The revelation has surprised researchers who have spent years trying to deduce what happens to this mysterious element at high pressures.
One way to study a material at high pressure is to compress a sample between the flattened tips of diamond crystals, fire X-rays at it, and study the diffraction pattern formed by the X-rays bouncing off the atoms inside. But when researchers tried this with tellurium, the resulting pattern included a series of faint spots that nobody could explain.
One problem…
