A team of physicists at UCLA has uncovered a strange and unexpected phenomenon—spiral patterns forming spontaneously on solid surfaces. The discovery, which began with a simple mistake in the lab, is ...

Hundreds of regular patterns spontaneously emerge on a small germanium chip. A curiosity about tiny dots on a germanium wafer with metal films led to the discovery of intricate spiral patterns etched ...

UCLA doctoral student Yilin Wong noticed that some tiny dots had appeared on one of her samples, which had been accidentally left out overnight. The layered sample consisted of a germanium wafer ...