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Science 30 October 1998:
Vol. 282. no. 5390, pp. 887 - 888
DOI: 10.1126/science.282.5390.887
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Perspectives

MATERIALS SCIENCE:
Opals in a New Light

Alfons van Blaaderen

The spectacular iridescence of natural opals is caused by light scattering from ordered arrays of dielectric material in these prized gemstones. As a result, there is much interest in synthesizing artificial opalescent materials as photonic materials. In his Perspective, van Blaaderen discusses results reported in the same issue by Zakhidov et al. showing that cubic graphite, an artificial opalescent material, has been synthesized. The method used by the authors, in combination with other techniques for making photonic band gap crystals, is likely to yield a new range of optical materials.

The author is at the Van't Hoff Laboratory, Debye Institute, Utrecht University, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands, and the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics, 1009 DB Amsterdam, Netherlands. E-mail: a.vanblaaderen{at}chem.uu.nl

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)