Self-assembly of quasicrystals and their approximants in fluids with bounded repulsive core and competing interactions.

We study through numerical simulations the phase behavior of a 2D system of particles interacting through a Gaussian repulsive core supplemented with a short-range attraction and a long-range repulsion. We find that the system investigated forms a variety of crystals, a phase characterized by stripe patterns, and quasicrystalline phases displaying 8-fold, 12-fold, and 18-fold symmetry. We discover that, in a narrow density range, particles self-assemble into remarkable clusters with dodecagonal symmetry, a phenomenon to our knowledge never reported previously in the literature.