Basic Elements of Crystallography

Book Preface

This book is intended to be a complete and clear introduction to the field of crystallography for undergraduate and graduate students and lecturers in physics, chemistry, biology, materials and earth sciences, or engineering. It includes an extensive discussion of the 14 Bravais lattices and the reciprocal to them, basic concepts of point group symmetry, the crystal structure of elements and binary compounds, and much more. Besides that, the reader can find up-to-date values for the lattice constants of most elements and about 650 binary compounds (half of them containing rare earth metals).

The entire notation in this book is consistent with the International Tables for Crystallography. We have made all possible effort to attract the reader with high quality illustrations showing all basic concepts in this area. Our purpose was to show rather than describe “using many words” the structure of materials and its basic properties. We believe that even readers who are completely not familiar with the topic, but still want to learn how the atoms are arranged in crystal structures, will find this book useful.

The text is organized into six chapters. Chapter I introduces basic concepts and definitions in the field of crystallography starting with oneand two-dimensional structures. Chapter II provides a detailed description of the 14 Bravais lattices. Chapter III describes the most important crystal structures of the elements with special emphasis on the close-packed structures and the interstices present in them. Chapter IV presents the structures of the most important binary compounds and reports the lattice constants of about 650 of them. Chapter V is devoted to the reciprocal lattice. Chapter VI, which is the final one, shows the relation between a direct lattice and its reciprocal.