Crystallography & Symmetry
patterns derived from their groups
Concept

Crystallographic restriction — where it appears

That periodicity permits rotations of order one, two, three, four and six only, because an integer matrix has an integer trace. Everything finite in this subject descends from it, and the same argument gives the same five orders in three dimensions.

Named by 39 essays across 8 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The five rotations a lattice will carry. One motif and every rotation a plane lattice permits: orders 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and nothing else up to 12. Each panel turns the motif by its own operation as many times as the order allows, on the lattice that operation requires — oblique for the identity and the half turn, hexagonal for the third and the sixth of a turn, square for the quarter. The trace printed under each is the sum of the diagonal of the operation's matrix written in the lattice's own basis, and it is a whole number in every panel, which is the entire content of the crystallographic restriction. The list of orders is produced twice, once from that trace condition and once from the degree of a cyclotomic polynomial, and the figure refuses to draw if the two disagree.

The crystallographic restriction

A repeating pattern may have rotations of order two, three, four or six, and nothing else whatever. The proof is one line of arithmetic, and everything finite in the subject descends from it.

restriction · Restriction The 48 point symmetries of a cubic lattice. Every operation that maps a cubic lattice onto itself, built as the integer matrices preserving that system's metric: 48 of them, of which 24 are proper rotations and 24 reverse handedness. The orders occurring among the rotations are 1, 2, 3, 4 — the same list the plane gives, so the crystallographic restriction does not change in three dimensions, and there is no six anywhere. The 13 rotation axes are counted from the rotations they carry rather than drawn from memory, and every rotation but the identity is checked to belong to exactly one of them.

The restriction in three dimensions

Space is roomier than the plane in every other respect, so the natural expectation is that it permits more rotation orders. It permits exactly the same five, and seeing why is more interesting than the result.

restriction · Restriction The crystal classes 4, 4̅, 3̅, 6̅. 4, 4̅, 3̅, 6̅: the orbit of a general direction under each group, giving 4, 4, 6, 6 poles, with general positions and symmetry elements. Filled marks are poles above the plane of the page and open ones below it.

What a trace decides

Ten kinds of operation, and two integers tell them apart. The determinant and the trace name a symmetry operation completely — which is why the classification can be run on integer matrices in a lattice basis and never once ask what angle anything turns through.

point-groups · Crystal classes Every solution of the axis equation. The integer solutions of 2 − 2/N = Σ(1 − 1/nᵢ), which is what counting the pairs (rotation, fixed pole) two ways gives. Two classes of axis force n₁ = n₂ = N and give the cyclic groups; three classes give the dihedral family and exactly three sporadic answers — (2, 3, 3), (2, 3, 4) and (2, 3, 5), of orders 12, 24 and 60, which are the rotation groups of the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the icosahedron. Four classes are impossible, because four terms of at least a half already exceed the left-hand side. Nothing about crystals has been used.

Before the lattice has a say

Every finite group of motions of the plane is a Cₙ or a Dₙ, and every finite group of rotations of space is one of five families. Both lists come out of counting rather than out of crystallography — and then the crystallographic restriction deletes almost all of them, leaving eleven.

restriction · Finite groups The eleven screw axes, enumerated. An n-fold axis admits a screw for every m from 1 to n − 1, so the orders a lattice permits — 2, 3, 4, 6 — give 11 screws in all. Each row shows the fraction of a cell one turn advances, plotted between zero and one. 3 of them are their own mirror image, which happens exactly when m is half of n; the others pair off into left- and right-handed twins.

Eleven ways to turn while climbing

Five rotation orders survive the crystallographic restriction, and each of them admits a screw for every whole number of cells its turns can amount to. That is a sum with four terms, and it is why there are eleven screw axes rather than some other number.

space-groups · Screws and glides The icosahedral group, counted. The sixty rotations of an icosahedron, found by trying every map that sends one adjacent pair of vertices to another and keeping those that carry the whole vertex set onto itself. They fall into 6 axes of order 5, 10 axes of order 3, 15 axes of order 2 — and the fivefold axes are the reason this group cannot be the point group of any crystal, since no three-dimensional lattice admits a rotation of order five. Quasicrystals have it anyway, which is what made 1982 an argument rather than a measurement.

Icosahedral symmetry

Sixty rotations, six fivefold axes, and no lattice in three dimensions that can hold any of them. It is the point group a crystal is forbidden, and the one the first quasicrystal turned out to have.

aperiodic · Quasicrystals How many ways each class can lose symmetry. Every crystal class, with the number of distinct classes it can descend to — 247 parent-and-child pairs in all across the thirty-two, counted up to conjugacy in the parent, which is the equivalence that says two descents differing only by which axis was chosen are one transition. The count rises steeply with the order of the parent, which is why the cubic and hexagonal holohedries dominate the list of materials with rich domain structures.

Two hundred and forty-seven descents, or two hundred and twelve

How many distinct ways can a crystal lose symmetry? Counting parent-and-child pairs up to conjugacy in the parent gives 247. The standard enumeration in the ferroics literature gives 212, and the operation that merges the extra thirty-five turns out to be a rotation through forty-five degrees — which no lattice may have, and which no integer matrix in a lattice basis can therefore express.

applied · Domains The most of an icosahedron a crystal can keep. Every subgroup of the sixty rotations of an icosahedron, found by closure, with the crystallographic ones marked — those whose rotation orders are all among the 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 that a three-dimensional lattice admits. The largest is 23, of order 12, at index 5; everything containing a fivefold axis is refused. So a crystal containing an icosahedral molecule may fix a twelfth of the molecule's own symmetry and no more, and the remaining 5 orientations have to be related by something other than the site's symmetry.

The most of an icosahedron a crystal can keep

C₆₀ sits in crystals and virus capsids sit in crystals, and neither of them stops being icosahedral. What a lattice can fix is a subgroup — and the largest crystallographic subgroup of the sixty rotations has order twelve, at index five. The five are Kepler's five cubes.

restriction · Local symmetry Why the seventeen is a number at all. The classification is finite because three counts in a row are finite, and the first two are where the work is. Finitely many lattice types, because a lattice's symmetry group is a finite group of integer matrices; finitely many such groups, by Minkowski's lemma and his bound; and finitely many ways to attach translations to each, which is the extension problem. Every step is a count this site makes elsewhere — five, thirteen, seventeen — and this is the reason each of those searches was allowed to stop.

Why there is a list at all

Five lattices, seventeen groups, thirty-two classes, two hundred and thirty. Every one of those counts came out of a search that had to know when to stop, and the reason it could stop is a divisibility Minkowski proved in 1887.

restriction · Finiteness 3.4.6.4 and its dual. The tiling in pale outline with its dual drawn over it: one dual vertex at the centre of every tile, one dual edge across every shared edge, and one dual tile round every vertex. 3.4.6.4 has 3 kinds of tile and one kind of vertex; its dual has one kind of tile and 3 kinds of vertex, and the congruence of those tiles is checked rather than eyeballed — every dual face presents the same cyclic sequence of squared edge lengths, compared exactly. That swap is what the eleven duals are for: read one way the list classifies tilings with all vertices alike, read the other it classifies tilings with all tiles alike.

Eleven duals, one tile each

Swap the vertices of a uniform tiling for its tiles and the eleven come back as eleven tilings by a single repeated shape. Three of those shapes are pentagons — which is worth pausing over on a site whose other essays prove that five-fold symmetry cannot exist.

classification · Tilings Which Schläfli symbols close. Every {p, q} with p polygons round each face and q faces round each vertex, from three to six of each. A solid exists only when 2p + 2q − pq is positive, which is the same statement as 1/p + 1/q > ½; the five that qualify carry their vertex, edge and face counts, and the three on the diagonal where the expression vanishes are the three regular tilings of the plane. Past them the expression is negative and the answer is the hyperbolic plane, where the list never ends. The five, the three and the infinity are one inequality read at its three signs.

Five solids from one inequality

Five families of rotation group in space, five regular solids, three regular tilings of the plane and an endless supply of hyperbolic ones — all of it is 1/p + 1/q compared with a half, read at its three signs.

restriction · Finite groups 60 vertices, 12 pentagons. A closed net with three edges at every vertex: 60 vertices, 90 edges and 32 faces, of which 12 are pentagons and 20 are hexagons. The pentagons are picked out in the second colour. Their number is not a property of this cage — it is twelve for every closed trivalent net of pentagons and hexagons, at any size, and the hexagon count is free.

Twelve pentagons, and no way round them

The crystallographic restriction forbids a five-fold face in a flat repeating net. Curve the net into a closed cage and the same three lines of arithmetic require exactly twelve of them — at any size, with the hexagon count free. What a lattice forbids, closing up compels.

restriction · Curvature 66 squares and 106 rhombs. The Ammann–Beenker tiling, built by keeping the points of a four-dimensional lattice whose companion image falls inside an octagon and projecting them into the plane. Every tile has the same edge length; the squares and the forty-five degree rhombs are told apart by their diagonals. Nothing was placed — the faces were found among the projected points.

Eight-fold, with the golden ratio taken out

The familiar quasicrystals are all built on five: Penrose's rhombs, the Fibonacci chain, the ten-fold pattern Shechtman measured. A method that works only on the golden ratio is a method tuned to its answer — so here is the same construction run on eight, where the irrational is √2 and nothing else changes.

aperiodic · Quasicrystals 5 units of 70.53°: 7.36° left. 5 tetrahedral units of face-centred cubic metal, each the mirror image of its neighbour in a {111} plane, arranged about a common ⟨110⟩ edge. The angle between two such planes is arccos(1/3) = 70.53°, computed from the plane normals rather than quoted, and 5 of them come to 352.64°. The shaded sector is what is left over: 7.36°, or 2.04 per cent of a full turn, which must be taken up by strain, by a gap, or by a defect along the axis.

Five copies, and the gap they leave

Gold, silver and silicon grow particles with a five-fold axis down the middle, out of a lattice that forbids one. Nothing is violated: five tetrahedral pieces of ordinary face-centred metal, each the mirror image of its neighbour, come to three hundred and fifty-two and a half degrees rather than three hundred and sixty — and the seven degrees left over have to go somewhere.

restriction · Local symmetry orders 5 and 7 reach a site of symmetry 1 and no more. A molecule whose only symmetry is one n-fold axis, and the highest site symmetry it may occupy in any of the 45 space groups this site builds. The site's symmetry has to be a subgroup of the molecule's, so the site's order must divide n and the site group must be cyclic. Orders 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 reach a site of their own order. Orders 5 and 7 reach one, because no site symmetry in any space group contains an operation of order five or seven — the orders available are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, computed by asking every operation of every group whether it moves a point. A five-fold molecule keeps its axis; the crystal simply has no use for it.

What a molecule gives up to sit in a crystal

A molecule brings its own symmetry. A crystal offers sites with symmetries of their own, and the two have to be compatible — the site's symmetry must be a subgroup of the molecule's. So a molecule may always keep more than its site offers, and a molecule with a five-fold axis may sit only where the crystal offers nothing at all.

restriction · Local symmetry Rotation orders 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and no others. Every net in this collection, with the orders of the rotations its own symmetry group has, and the degrees of its vertices beside them. The orders are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 — the crystallographic restriction, arrived at with no length anywhere in the argument: the translations of a net are ℤ² by construction, an automorphism carries translations to translations, so it acts on ℤ² by an integer matrix, and an integer trace in the interval from minus two to two is one of five numbers. The degree column is there because the two are constantly confused: a net may perfectly well have vertices of degree five, and one here does.

The restriction, with no lattice assumed

The proof that only two-, three-, four- and six-fold rotations are possible is usually stated about a lattice, and every step of it turns out to need no lengths at all. A periodic graph has the same theorem, proved the same way — and a graph may have a five-fold symmetry the plane cannot receive.

restriction · Restriction The invariant degrees exist for every n; the lattice permits five of them. The reflection group with an n-fold rotation has an invariant ring generated in degrees 2 and n, for every n whatever — the dimensions on the right are counted by pairing monomials in complex coordinates, which needs no matrix and therefore no lattice. Five of these groups can be written in integer matrices, and those five are named in the middle column; the rest cannot, because a lattice has no five-fold or seven-fold rotation. The crystallographic restriction is usually a statement about traces of matrices. Here it is the statement that only five of these invariant rings belong to a crystal, and the two arguments have nothing in common but their answer.

The degrees that name the restriction

The reflection group with an n-fold rotation has invariants of degrees 2 and n — for every n, with no lattice anywhere in the argument. Which of those groups a crystal may have is then the only question left, and its answer is the crystallographic restriction arriving from a direction nobody points it from.

restriction · Restriction The ten plane classes, and the dimensions they permit. Every crystallographic point group of the plane, with one block per irreducible representation and each block as wide as its dimension. Nine of the ten have only one-dimensional representations; 4mm, 3m and 6mm carry a two-dimensional one, drawn in the measured colour. Nothing is wider than two, and the sum of the squares of the widths in each row is the order of that group — the identity that says the row is complete.

How large a degeneracy may be

Symmetry can force two things to have the same value, and in a crystal it can force three. It can never force five, and the reason is a sum of squares — the same kind of arithmetic that forbids a five-fold axis, arriving at a question about levels rather than about rotations.

point-groups · Representations The sphere fixes a count; the torus fixes only a difference. Euler's relation for a trivalent net gives Σ (6 − n) pₙ = 6χ, so the surface fixes one linear combination of the face counts and nothing else. On a sphere that combination is twelve, which with no face smaller than a pentagon forces exactly twelve pentagons. On a torus it is zero, which permits any number of pentagons provided as many heptagons pay for them — and permits none at all, which is the plain hexagonal net. On a surface of two holes it is minus twelve, so heptagons become compulsory instead.

As many heptagons as pentagons

A trivalent net on a sphere must have exactly twelve pentagons. The same three lines of arithmetic on a torus give zero — which does not forbid pentagons, it makes them pay: every pentagon has to be balanced by a heptagon, and the counts are otherwise free. One rotated bond in a wrapped honeycomb makes two of each and changes nothing else.

restriction · Curvature Four angles, and the integer that picks them. Two roots at angle θ have Cartan integers whose product is 4cos²θ. Both are whole numbers and the product is below four, so it is nought, one, two or three — and each value fixes the angle between the two roots, and with it the angle between the mirrors perpendicular to them. The shaded wedge is the region the pair of mirrors folds the plane onto; the smaller it is, the larger the group they generate.

Four root systems, and the same four rotations

Two mirrors meeting at an angle generate a group. Ask that the group be finite and that a certain pairing between the mirrors come out a whole number, and the angle has only four possible values — from which the rotations that survive are of order two, three, four and six. The crystallographic restriction arrives with no lattice anywhere in the argument.

restriction · Restriction The cross, from the selection rule alone. The layer lines of a helix with the first maximum of each marked on both sides. Nothing here is a picture of a photograph: each mark is at the radius where the Bessel function of the lowest order the selection rule permits on that layer line first peaks, and that radius is proportional to the order. The order rises by one per layer line until the middle of the repeat, so the maxima lie on two straight lines through the origin — the X — and the larger marks are the layer lines that reach the axis.

What a thread scatters

A helix with ten subunits in a turn is not a screw axis a crystal may have, and nothing about its diffraction pattern is lawless. The pattern lies on layer lines, and on each one only certain angular orders may contribute — a selection rule as hard as any extinction condition. The lowest permitted order rises by one per layer line, a Bessel function of order n does nothing until its argument is about n, and the maxima therefore lie on two straight lines through the origin.

classification · Subperiodic The same accounting, at every coordination number. One row per number of edges at a vertex. The bill a sphere charges is 2dχ; the face worth nothing is 2d/(d − 2), which is a whole number at three, four and six and is 10/3 at five; the faces that can pay are those with fewer sides than that; and the last column is every way of paying the whole bill with faces of a single size. At three edges a vertex there are three such ways and twelve pentagons is one of them. At six there are none, which is the statement that six-fold coordination belongs to the plane and to no closed surface at all.

The twelve belongs to the vertex

Twelve pentagons is read as a fact about closing a surface. It is not: it is a fact about three edges meeting at a point. Let four edges meet instead and the sphere charges eight triangles; let five meet and it charges twenty; let six meet and it cannot be paid at all.

restriction · Curvature The seven friezes rolled into cylinders are the seven axial families. Each of the seven frieze groups drawn on a strip 3 cells long, beside the same strip rolled into a cylinder so that its ends meet. A translation by one cell becomes a rotation by a 3th of a turn about the axis, a mirror across the strip a mirror containing the axis, the centre line a mirror perpendicular to it, a half-turn in the strip a half-turn about a horizontal axis, and a glide a rotation by half a cell's angle combined with that perpendicular mirror. Each cylinder's symmetry group was built from the rolled strip and again from the family's own generators, and the two agree. At n = 3 the orders are 3, 6, 6, 6, 6, 12, 12, and the last column names the crystal class each member is, coloured by whether it is proper, contains the centre, or is neither.

Seven friezes round a cylinder

A point group with one principal axis belongs to one of seven infinite families, and there are seven frieze groups. They are the same seven. Draw a frieze on a strip, roll the strip into a cylinder, and every translation becomes a turn about the axis and every glide a rotoreflection.

restriction · Finite groups Two turns and their undoing leave a slide. A turn g by 90° about the point c and a turn h by 60° about d. The marked point p is carried back 60° about d, back 90° about c, forward 60° about d and forward 90° about c, and does not return: it arrives displaced by a vector of length 2.371, which is 4·sin 45°·sin 30°·|c − d|. Two other points put through the same four motions move by the same vector, drawn beside them, because the commutator g h g⁻¹ h⁻¹ of two rotations of the plane is a translation — (I − A)(I − B)(c − d) exactly — whatever the angles and the centres.

What forces a lattice

Every enumeration here starts from a lattice of translations, and the lattice is usually taken as given. It need not be. A group of motions that is discrete, and leaves no point far from an orbit, has to contain one — in the plane by an argument four lines long, each line a picture, and in space by an inequality whose threshold turns out to be the six-fold rotation.

restriction · Finiteness The rectangle a (4, 2) tube is rolled from. A patch of honeycomb turned so that the rolling vector C = 4a₁ + 2a₂ lies along the page. C has length √28 ≈ 5.292; the shortest lattice vector perpendicular to it, T, has length 4.583; and the rectangle on the two holds 28 hexagons and 56 atoms. Rolling the rectangle so that its left and right edges meet makes one repeat of the tube. The two lines through the corner are the sheet's mirror directions nearest C: the zigzag direction along a₁ and the armchair direction thirty degrees from it. C makes an angle of 19.11° with the first and lies on neither.

The tube has a screw no lattice allows

Roll a honeycomb along one of its lattice vectors and the tube turns and climbs with a screw of order 14, 98 or 794 — orders the flat sheet could never have. The rolling keeps the sheet's translations and spends them on turns, and it keeps the sheet's mirrors only along two directions, which is why almost every carbon nanotube comes in two hands.

restriction · Finite groups Whether a rolled sheet ever comes back round. Three plane lattices, each with the same rolling vector C = 3a₁ + a₂ drawn from the origin and the line through the origin perpendicular to it. A translation of the rolled pattern straight up the tube, with no turn, is a lattice vector on that line. The square lattice has one, marked T, and the tube repeats every 10 turns. The general rectangular lattice has none in this direction — only along its cell edges — and the general oblique lattice has none in any direction at all, so its rolled pattern climbs forever without returning to the same angle.

Most sheets roll into a tube that never repeats

Rolling the honeycomb along a lattice vector always gives a tube with a repeat, and that is a property of the honeycomb rather than of rolling. Over the seventeen plane groups, 567 of 1,008 rolling directions give a tube with no translation along its axis at all — and every direction of an oblique pattern is one of them.

restriction · Finite groups Fifty-four of the seventy-five rod groups are a rolled plane pattern. Every rod group, one dot each, grouped by its crystal class. A dot is filled when some plane pattern rolled along some lattice vector has exactly that group, and the 106 crystallographic rollings of the seventeen plane groups fill 54 of them. The eighteen improper classes are full: every one of the 43 achiral rod groups is reached. The nine proper classes are not, and the twenty-one groups named on the right are what is missing — the sixteen whose screw is one of a left- and right-handed pair, and the five bare axes with no climb at all, p1, p112, p3, p4 and p6.

A rolled sheet is never one of a pair

Rolled up along every lattice vector that gives a crystallographic tube, the seventeen plane groups reach fifty-four of the seventy-five rod groups: every achiral one and eleven of the chiral. Not one of the sixteen screws that come in left- and right-handed pairs is among them, and the reason is a single fact about how far a rolled lattice can climb.

restriction · Finite groups The turns a rolled sheet can make are square roots. Every primitive rolling of a square and of a hexagonal sheet with at most 66 cells in a repeat, one mark per distinct turn. Across is the number of cells n₀ in one repeat of the tube; up is the turn, as a fraction of a circle, of the screw that climbs one n₀-th of the repeat. Most columns are empty, and the occupied ones hold two or four marks rather than anything up to n₀: on the square sheet the turns are exactly the square roots of minus one modulo n₀, on the hexagonal sheet the roots of the corresponding congruence for minus three. The pattern is symmetric about half a turn because a root and its negative are the two hands of one tube.

A rolled sheet turns by a square root

Roll a square sheet into a tube of thirteen cells and its screw could, on paper, turn by any of twelve fractions of a circle. It turns by five thirteenths or eight, and nothing else, because five squared plus one is a multiple of thirteen. Every rolled tube's screw is a square root of minus the sheet's determinant — which is why handed tubes appear only at the orders Fermat allows, why they always come in both hands, and why the crystallographic ones need an accident.

restriction · Finite groups Three rotations of order twelve, and one twelve-fold. Three integer 4 × 4 matrices of order twelve, one from each rational class of that order on a four-dimensional lattice. A four-dimensional rotation turns two perpendicular planes, and each plane is drawn as a dial: a point, its images, and the path the operation takes round them. Φ₁₂ turns its planes by one twelfth and five twelfths of a turn, so a point runs round twelve positions. Φ₃ ⊕ Φ₄ turns one plane by a third and the other by a quarter, and Φ₄ ⊕ Φ₆ by a quarter and a sixth; each has order twelve because twelve is the least common multiple, and neither has a plane with twelve positions in it.

Three rotations of order twelve

A four-dimensional lattice can be carried onto itself by three different integer matrices of order twelve, and only one of them turns anything by a twelfth of a turn. The totient that is usually said to decide which orders a dimension permits decides something else: which angles. The orders are decided by a sum over blocks, the two lists part company at six dimensions, and space already has an operation whose order is not its angle.

restriction · Restriction The closure is a lattice exactly when the orders allow one. Twelve pairs of rotation orders, with a centre of each order placed one unit apart and the group they generate closed out to words of length 6. The linear parts reached are exactly the least common multiple of the two orders, every time — two rotations generate rotations, and the angles they generate are the multiples of the smaller of two fractions of a turn. A lattice admits rotations of order one, two, three, four and six and no others, so the closure can be a plane group exactly when that multiple is one of those five. The pairs where it is not are the pairs where the translations keep getting shorter.

Closing the plane from two centres

Put two rotation centres down and close under composition: the result is a plane group or is not discrete, and nothing in between. What decides it is the least common multiple of the two orders, because two rotations generate rotations and the angles add — so the crystallographic restriction arrives as a condition on a closure rather than as one on a lattice.

operations · Composition Which four-dimensional lattices carry which rotations of order twelve. Six four-dimensional lattices, the order of each one's symmetry group, and how many of its symmetries are of each of the three kinds of order twelve: the single block Φ₁₂, the third-turn with a quarter-turn Φ₃Φ₄, and the quarter-turn with a sixth-turn Φ₄Φ₆. D₄ has 96 of the first among 1,152 symmetries, the two hexagonal planes 24 among 288, and the hexagonal-and-square sum 4 of each of the other two among 96. No lattice has all three, and none has the first with either other.

No lattice carries all three twelves

Four-dimensional lattices admit three different operations of order twelve: one that turns a single irreducible block by a twelfth, and two that turn two planes, by a third and a quarter or by a quarter and a sixth. Computing the symmetry group of every kind of four-dimensional lattice that can have a maximal one shows that no lattice carries all three, and none carries the first with either of the others. D₄, the most symmetric of them, has only the first.

restriction · Restriction The turns that keep the join discrete. Two copies of p4 on one square lattice, one turned against the other, with the shortest translation their union generates. At a turn whose cosine and sine are both rational the translations are a lattice, and its shortest vector is one over the square root of Σ — where Σ is the odd part of p² + q² for the rational point (p, q) — which the measurement reproduces to six places at every one tried. At a whole number of degrees other than a multiple of ninety there is no such point, and the search finds shorter translations the further it runs.

Two patterns laid over one another

Compose two plane groups rather than two operations. The group generated by both is one of the seventeen or is not discrete at all, with nothing between — and it takes two conditions, one on the rotation orders and one on the turn between the lattices. The turns that work have rational cosines, which by a theorem of Niven's means none of them is a whole number of degrees.

operations · Composition Twelve kinds of operation six dimensions adds, and the lattices that carry them. The twelve rational kinds of operation whose orders first appear in five or six dimensions — 7, 9, 14, 15, 18, 20 (two kinds), 24 (two) and 30 (three) — against six lattices whose symmetry groups were computed element by element. Every kind is carried by at least one. All three kinds of order thirty are carried by A₄ ⊕ A₂, forty-eight symmetries each; the single-block kinds Φ₇ and Φ₁₄ only by A₆, and Φ₉ and Φ₁₈ by E₆ and by three hexagonal planes.

The thirties share a lattice

Four dimensions has three kinds of operation of order twelve and no lattice carries all three. Six dimensions has three kinds of order thirty, and one lattice carries every one of them, forty-eight times each. The difference is not the order. One of the twelves is a single block that cannot be split, and no thirty is: thirty needs eight dimensions to be irreducible, so in six it is always a five-fold piece beside a three-fold one, and the lattice that is both pieces holds every combination.

restriction · Restriction Three mirrors of a 30–30–120 triangle, closed. A triangle with angles of thirty, thirty and a hundred and twenty degrees, shaded, and every image of it under the group its three side-mirrors generate, within a window. The images alternate between the triangle and its mirror image, and they tile the plane — so the closure is discrete. But the group it produces has a mirror along the triangle's own altitude, drawn dashed, that is none of the three given: the triangle is two copies of the thirty–sixty–ninety triangle, and the group is that triangle's, p6m. The closure found a mirror the generators did not name.

Four groups are made of mirrors

Close the plane from located mirrors instead of rotation centres and the closure is discrete only for four triangles of mirrors — and one of those four manufactures a mirror along its own altitude. Of the ten plane groups that contain a reflection, exactly four are generated by their mirrors; three hold a kaleidoscope at index two, three and four, which are the numbers in front of the star in their orbifold symbols; and three have mirrors in one direction only, which generate nothing along themselves.

operations · Composition The centrings each holohedry allows, prime by prime. For each of the seven holohedries on its conventional lattice and each prime from 2 to 7, how many of the lines and planes of the lattice reduced modulo that prime the holohedry leaves invariant, and which of them give a lattice other than the one being centred. At 2 they give C for the monoclinic system, C, I and F for the orthorhombic, I for the tetragonal and I and F for the cubic; at 3 they give the rhombohedral lattice from the hexagonal one; at 5 and 7 nothing new.

Only two and three can centre a lattice

The centring letters P, A, B, C, I, F and R are usually a list brought to the Bravais lattices. They can be derived instead: a centring is a subspace of the lattice reduced modulo a prime, and a centring that keeps a crystal system's symmetry is a subspace its holohedry leaves invariant. Enumerating every one for the seven holohedries and the primes up to seven gives exactly the fourteen, with new lattices only at two and three. The reason is the crystallographic restriction, one step removed: every holohedry has an order made of twos and threes.

lattices · Centring The centrings six four-dimensional lattice groups allow, prime by prime. For each of the six four-dimensional lattices whose symmetry groups are maximal, with the group's order, and each prime from 2 to 7: the subspaces of the lattice modulo that prime the group keeps, sorted by what centring by each one makes. New Bravais types appear only at 2, three of them, all over the cube-and-line lattice, and at 5, where A₄ centred by fifths is A₄*. Both centrings of the hypercubic lattice by halves make D₄, which has three times the symmetry.

The body-centred hypercube is the checkerboard lattice

In three dimensions the centring letters come out as the subspaces a holohedry keeps modulo a prime, and only two and three make new lattices. In four dimensions the same census, run on the six lattices whose symmetry groups are maximal, finds a prime that the three-dimensional argument never could: five centres A₄ into its dual. It also finds that the most familiar centring does not survive the extra dimension. The body-centred hypercubic lattice is not a centred hypercube at all: its body centre is exactly as far away as an edge, and it is D₄, with three times the symmetry.

lattices · Centring Seventeen ways to have order thirty in eight dimensions, and four on E₈. Every product of cyclotomic polynomials of total degree eight whose order is thirty: 17 of them. E₈'s symmetry group holds 4: the single block Φ₃₀ and three split kinds, each with a one-dimensional piece of each sign or a doubled minus one. The other thirteen fit the dimension and have no element on this lattice.

Thirty as one block lives on two lattices

Eight dimensions is where an operation of order thirty can finally be a single irreducible block. It was predicted to sit alone on E₈ with the split kinds elsewhere, as the twelves do in four dimensions. It does not: E₈ holds three split thirties beside it, and exactly three of the sixteen that fit, because a five-fold block leaves nothing but a permutation of five things. The block also lives on a second lattice, A₂ ⊗ A₄, and there it really is alone.

restriction · Restriction Every form tried, by its symmetries and by how well it packs. 5902 totally positive forms of the ring of fifteenth roots of unity, sorted by the order of their symmetry group into five rows. Forms with 60 and 120 symmetries form scattered bands. Two lattices have 1,440, the tensor products of A2 with A4 and with its dual. One has 14,400, a member of the icosian line; one has 28,800, the icosian ring with its plain trace; and one is E8. The highest Hermite number among forms with only 60 symmetries is above that of the 28,800 lattice.

One ring is E8 and a lattice with no mirror

An operation of order thirty as one block in eight dimensions preserves a whole family of forms, and E₈ was one point of it. Walking the family finds sixty symmetries almost everywhere and two lines above that. One is tensor products. The other is the icosian ring, on which E₈ is famously built, under a sliding choice of form: 14,400 symmetries all along it, 28,800 and not one reflection at one end, and at the other end E₈, where the group jumps by a factor of nearly fifty thousand.

restriction · Restriction The subgroups of index two, and what joins them. Every affine type of space group by crystal system: its subgroups of index two, 1813 in all; classes under the origin shifts alone, 1392; classes under the whole affine normaliser, 1159; and the fewest classes one cell can give, 1161. Best cell and affine agree in every system except the triclinic.

No cell joins the seven halves

Every identification the normaliser makes between Wyckoff positions is made by an isometry of some cell, and it was natural to expect the same of subgroups. It nearly is. Across all 219 types and their 1,813 subgroups of index two, one cell does everything the normaliser does, except in the two triclinic groups. P1 has seven ways to be halved, and its normaliser makes them all one. No cell can, because seven is the number the crystallographic restriction forbids.

operations · Normalisers

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

EnumerationCyclotomic polynomialsScrew axisHolohedryPoint groupRod groupSubgroupChiralityDiscretenessDualityFinite groupHelix

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