3D atomic imaging reveals gradient-based crystal formation, challenging century-old theory

For a century, scientists believed crystals emerged from disorder with sudden, sharp boundaries — a clean theory that textbooks enshrined and industries relied upon. Now, a UCLA team using three-dimensional atomic imaging has looked directly at the birth of crystals and found something more gradual, more layered, and more true: nuclei grow from ordered cores that fade into chaos at their edges, like a thought becoming clear at its center before dissolving at its margins. Published in Nature Materials in August 2026, their gradient nucleation pathways model does not overthrow the old theory so

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3D atomic imaging reveals gradient-based crystal formation, challenging century-old theory

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