Ideality versus reality: Emergence of the Chui icosahedron

Over the past decades it has been widely established that many face-centered cubic metals exhibit various structural and morphological modifications at the nanoscale, such as icosahedral, decahedral, and truncated decahedral structures. One of the most widely studied among these is the nonconvex decahedral polyhedron introduced by Marks, but a survey of the literature reveals that a similar modification of the ideal icosahedron may be just as prevalent. In this paper we present a systematic study of a new truncated icosahedral structure, based on the results of Chui, and show that although it is less geometrically ideal than the Mackay icosahedron, it is more stable and thermodynamically realistic at large sizes.