Corundum is a crystalline form of aluminium oxide typically containing traces of iron, titanium, vanadium and chromium. It is a rock-forming mineral. It is a naturally transparent material, but can have different colors depending on the presence of transition metal impurities in its crystalline structure. Corundum has two primary gem varieties: ruby and sapphire. Rubies are red due to the presence of chromium, and sapphires exhibit a range of colors depending on what transition metal is present. A rare type of sapphire, padparadscha sapphire, is pink-orange.
Crystallography is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids. Crystallography is a fundamental subject in the fields of materials science and solid-state physics. The word "crystallography" is derived from the Greek words crystallon "cold drop, frozen drop", with its meaning extending to all solids with some degree of transparency, and graphein "to write". In July 2012, the United Nations recognised the importance of the science of crystallography by proclaiming that 2014 would be the International Year of Crystallography.
Mineralogy is a subject of geology specializing in the scientific study of the chemistry, crystal structure, and physical properties of minerals and mineralized artifacts. Specific studies within mineralogy include the processes of mineral origin and formation, classification of minerals, their geographical distribution, as well as their utilization.
Evgraf Stepanovich Fedorov was a Russian mathematician, crystallographer and mineralogist.
Paul Niggli was a Swiss crystallographer who was a leader in the field of X-ray crystallography.
Carl Heinrich Hermann, or Carl HermannGerman: [kaʁl ˈhɛʁman](listen), was a German physicist and crystallographer known for his research in crystallographic symmetry, nomenclature, and mathematical crystallography in N-dimensional spaces. Hermann was a pioneer in crystallographic databases and, along with Paul Peter Ewald, published the first volume of the influential Strukturbericht in 1931.
Hugo M. Rietveld was a Dutch crystallographer who is famous for his publication on the full profile refinement method in powder diffraction, which became later known as the Rietveld refinement method. The method is used for the characterisation of crystalline materials from X-ray powder diffraction data. The Rietveld refinement uses a least squares approach to refine a theoretical line profile until it matches the measured profile. The introduction of this technique which used the full profile instead of individual reflections was a significant step forward in the diffraction analysis of powder samples.
Acta Crystallographica is a series of peer-reviewed scientific journals, with articles centred on crystallography, published by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). Originally established in 1948 as a single journal called Acta Crystallographica, there are now six independent Acta Crystallographica titles:
A crystallographic database is a database specifically designed to store information about the structure of molecules and crystals. Crystals are solids having, in all three dimensions of space, a regularly repeating arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules. They are characterized by symmetry, morphology, and directionally dependent physical properties. A crystal structure describes the arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules in a crystal.
Fritz Henning Emil Paul Berndt Laves was a German crystallographer who served as the president of the German Mineralogical Society from 1956 to 1958. He is the namesake of Laves phases and the Laves tilings; the Laves graph, a highly-symmetrical three-dimensional crystal structure that he studied, was named after him by H. S. M. Coxeter.
Robert Miller Hazen is an American mineralogist and astrobiologist. He is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, in the United States. Hazen is the Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory.
Elizabeth Armstrong Wood (1912–2006) was an American crystallographer and geologist who ran a research program at Bell Telephone Laboratories that led to the development of new superconductors and lasers. She was known for the clarity of her writing and her efforts to educate the general public about scientific subjects.
Zeitschrift für Kristallographie – Crystalline Materials is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published in English. The journal publishes theoretical and experimental studies in crystallography of both organic and inorganic substances. The editor-in-chief of the journal is Rainer Pöttgen from the University of Münster. The journal was founded in 1877 under the title Zeitschrift für Krystallographie und Mineralogie by crystallographer and mineralogist Paul Heinrich von Groth, who served as the editor for 44 years. It has used several titles over its history, with the present title having been adopted in 2010. The journal is indexed in a variety of databases and has a 2020 impact factor of 1.616.
Zeitschrift für Kristallographie – New Crystal Structures is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published in English. Its first issue was published in December 1997 and bore the subtitle "International journal for structural, physical, and chemical aspects of crystalline materials." Created as a spin-off of Zeitschrift für Kristallographie for reporting novel and refined crystal structures, it began at volume 212 in order to remain aligned with the numbering of the parent journal. Paul von Groth, Professor of Mineralogy at the University of Strasbourg, established Zeitschrift für Krystallographie und Mineralogie in 1877; after several name changes, the journal adopted its present name, Zeitschrift für Kristallographie – Crystalline Materials, in 2010.
In crystallography, a Strukturbericht designation or Strukturbericht type is a system of detailed crystal structure classification by analogy to another known structure. The designations were intended to be comprehensive but are mainly used as supplement to space group crystal structures designations, especially historically. Each Strukturbericht designation is described by a single space group, but the designation includes additional information about the positions of the individual atoms, rather than just the symmetry of the crystal structure. While Strukturbericht symbols exist for many of the earliest observed and most common crystal structures, the system is not comprehensive, and is no longer being updated. Modern databases such as Inorganic Crystal Structure Database index thousands of structure types directly by the prototype compound. These are essentially equivalent to the old Stukturbericht designations.
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.
Karin Aurivillius (1920–1982) was a Swedish chemist and crystallographer at the University of Lund, Sweden. She determined the crystal structures of many mercury compounds.
Robert Day Shannon is a retired research chemist formerly at DuPont de Nemours, Inc..
Friedrich Karl Franz Liebau was a German chemist, crystallographer, and mineralogist known for his research in silicates.
Charles Thompson Prewitt was an American mineralogist and solid state chemist known for his work on structural chemistry of minerals and high-pressure chemistry.
