WHICH DISTRIBUTIONS OF MATTER DIFFRACT ? AN INITIAL INVESTIGATION

Abstract

We report on a preliminary investigation of the connections between quasiperiodic tilings, algebraic number theory, and cut-and-project sets. We substantially answer the question "which 1-dimensional tilings obtained by inflation rules are quasiperiodic" by showing that in general the characteristic equation of the inflation rule should have one root of absolute value greater than one and the rest of absolute value less than one. We also show that the vertices of such a tiling are contained in a cut-and-project set.