In crystallography, crystal structure is a description of ordered arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules in a crystalline material. Ordered structures occur from intrinsic nature of constituent particles to form symmetric patterns that repeat along the principal directions of three-dimensional space in matter.
In geometry, biology, mineralogy and solid state physics, a unit cell is a repeating unit formed by the vectors spanning the points of a lattice. Despite its suggestive name, the unit cell does not necessarily have unit size, or even a particular size at all. Rather, the primitive cell is the closest analogy to a unit vector, since it has a determined size for a given lattice and is the basic building block from which larger cells are constructed.
In mathematics, physics and chemistry, a space group is the symmetry group of a repeating pattern in space, usually in three dimensions. The elements of a space group are the rigid transformations of the pattern that leave it unchanged. In three dimensions, space groups are classified into 219 distinct types, or 230 types if chiral copies are considered distinct. Space groups are discrete cocompact groups of isometries of an oriented Euclidean space in any number of dimensions. In dimensions other than 3, they are sometimes called Bieberbach groups.
In crystallography, the monoclinic crystal system is one of the seven crystal systems. A crystal system is described by three vectors. In the monoclinic system, the crystal is described by vectors of unequal lengths, as in the orthorhombic system. They form a parallelogram prism. Hence two pairs of vectors are perpendicular, while the third pair makes an angle other than 90°.
In crystallography, the orthorhombic crystal system is one of the 7 crystal systems. Orthorhombic lattices result from stretching a cubic lattice along two of its orthogonal pairs by two different factors, resulting in a rectangular prism with a rectangular base (a by b) and height (c), such that a, b, and c are distinct. All three bases intersect at 90° angles, so the three lattice vectors remain mutually orthogonal.
In geometry and crystallography, a Bravais lattice, named after Auguste Bravais, is an infinite array of discrete points generated by a set of discrete translation operations described in three dimensional space by
In crystallography, a crystallographic point group is a three dimensional point group whose symmetry operations are compatible with a three dimensional crystallographic lattice. According to the crystallographic restriction it may only contain one-, two-, three-, four- and sixfold rotations or rotoinversions. This reduces the number of crystallographic point groups to 32. These 32 groups are one-and-the-same as the 32 types of morphological (external) crystalline symmetries derived in 1830 by Johann Friedrich Christian Hessel from a consideration of observed crystal forms.
In crystallography, the tricliniccrystal system is one of the seven crystal systems. A crystal system is described by three basis vectors. In the triclinic system, the crystal is described by vectors of unequal length, as in the orthorhombic system. In addition, the angles between these vectors must all be different and may not include 90°.
In geometry, an n-gonaltrapezohedron, n-trapezohedron, n-antidipyramid, n-antibipyramid, or n-deltohedron, is the dual polyhedron of an n-gonal antiprism. The 2n faces of an n-trapezohedron are congruent and symmetrically staggered; they are called twisted kites. With a higher symmetry, its 2n faces are kites.
The Schoenfliesnotation, named after the German mathematician Arthur Moritz Schoenflies, is a notation primarily used to specify point groups in three dimensions. Because a point group alone is completely adequate to describe the symmetry of a molecule, the notation is often sufficient and commonly used for spectroscopy. However, in crystallography, there is additional translational symmetry, and point groups are not enough to describe the full symmetry of crystals, so the full space group is usually used instead. The naming of full space groups usually follows another common convention, the Hermann–Mauguin notation, also known as the international notation.
Miller indices form a notation system in crystallography for lattice planes in crystal (Bravais) lattices.
In geometry, a point group is a mathematical group of symmetry operations (isometries in a Euclidean space) that have a fixed point in common. The coordinate origin of the Euclidean space is conventionally taken to be a fixed point, and every point group in dimension d is then a subgroup of the orthogonal group O(d). Point groups are used to describe the symmetries of geometric figures and physical objects such as molecules.
In crystallography, a centrosymmetric point group contains an inversion center as one of its symmetry elements. In such a point group, for every point in the unit cell there is an indistinguishable point. Such point groups are also said to have inversion symmetry. Point reflection is a similar term used in geometry. Crystals with an inversion center cannot display certain properties, such as the piezoelectric effect and the frequency doubling effect. In addition, in such crystals, one-photon absorption (OPA) and two-photon absorption (TPA) processes are mutually exclusive, i.e., they do not occur simultaneously, and provide complementary information.
In geometry, Hermann–Mauguin notation is used to represent the symmetry elements in point groups, plane groups and space groups. It is named after the German crystallographer Carl Hermann and the French mineralogist Charles-Victor Mauguin. This notation is sometimes called international notation, because it was adopted as standard by the International Tables For Crystallography since their first edition in 1935.
In geometry, a point reflection is a geometric transformation of affine space in which every point is reflected across a designated inversion center, which remains fixed. In Euclidean or pseudo-Euclidean spaces, a point reflection is an isometry. In the Euclidean plane, a point reflection is the same as a half-turn rotation, while in three-dimensional Euclidean space a point reflection is an improper rotation which preserves distances but reverses orientation. A point reflection is an involution: applying it twice is the identity transformation.
The Pearson symbol, or Pearson notation, is used in crystallography as a means of describing a crystal structure, and was originated by W. B. Pearson. The symbol is made up of two letters followed by a number. For example:
In crystallography, the hexagonal crystal family is one of the six crystal families, which includes two crystal systems and two lattice systems. While commonly confused, the trigonal crystal system and the rhombohedral lattice system are not equivalent. In particular, there are crystals that have trigonal symmetry but belong to the hexagonal lattice.
In mathematics, a layer group is a three-dimensional extension of a wallpaper group, with reflections in the third dimension. It is a space group with a two-dimensional lattice, meaning that it is symmetric over repeats in the two lattice directions. The symmetry group at each lattice point is an axial crystallographic point group with the main axis being perpendicular to the lattice plane.
In solid state physics, the magnetic space groups, or Shubnikov groups, are the symmetry groups which classify the symmetries of a crystal both in space, and in a two-valued property such as electron spin. To represent such a property, each lattice point is colored black or white, and in addition to the usual three-dimensional symmetry operations, there is a so-called "antisymmetry" operation which turns all black lattice points white and all white lattice points black. Thus, the magnetic space groups serve as an extension to the crystallographic space groups which describe spatial symmetry alone.
