Crystallography & Symmetry
patterns derived from their groups
Concept

Disclination — where it appears

A line defect whose closure failure is a rotation rather than a translation, made by taking a wedge out of a lattice or putting one in. The angle must be a rotation the lattice permits, so a six-fold net may lose sixty degrees and may not lose forty.

Named by 5 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

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 A circuit that closes on the wrong point: (1, 0). A square lattice with one extra half-column, drawn as a graph: the rows above the core have one more site than the rows below, and the core is the site at the end of the extra column. The path is 4 steps east, 4 north, 4 west and 4 south — the same number out as back — and it ends one lattice vector from where it started. Every one of the 12 circuits in the survey that goes round the core fails by that vector, and all 10 that miss it close exactly.

The circuit that does not close

A defect in a crystal is usually introduced as a picture — an extra half-row of atoms, a wedge taken out. What makes a defect a crystallographic object rather than a drawing is a closure failure: walk a closed circuit through the lattice and come back to the wrong point, by an amount the lattice itself decides.

applied · Defects square: 3 dislocations, 2 stable. The short lattice vectors of the square lattice, grouped into orbits under its own automorphism group of 8 operations. Two vectors of one orbit are the same defect seen from different directions, so the number of kinds of dislocation is the number of orbits — 3 out to 4 times the shortest squared length. Each orbit has its own colour. Solid arrows are stable: no pair of shorter lattice vectors adds to them with a smaller total of |b|². Dashed ones split, and 1 of the orbits do. Which splits is decided by comparing integers; that the energy goes as |b|² at all is Frank's rule and comes from elasticity, not from here.

How many dislocations a lattice has

A circuit round a defect comes back to the wrong lattice point, and the amount by which it misses is a lattice vector. That much is quantised. The next question has a number for an answer: how many *different* dislocations are there? Two Burgers vectors related by an operation of the point group are one defect seen twice, so the answer is a count of orbits.

applied · Defects The kinds of line defect each breaking allows. The eleven proper crystal classes, each with the order of the binary group that covers it, the number of conjugacy classes of that group other than the identity — which is the number of kinds of line defect — and whether the group commutes. 6 of the eleven do not, and in those media two defect lines cannot pass through each other without leaving a third line behind.

The defect that needs two laps

Which defects a medium can have is not a fact about the medium. It is a fact about the space its order parameter lives in, and for a rotational symmetry broken down to a point group that space has a fundamental group twice the size of the point group. The kinds of line defect are its conjugacy classes — and in six of the eleven cases they do not commute, which means two defect lines cannot pass through each other.

applied · Defects Seven fields and the number that counts each one. The degree of each field, computed by triangulating the sphere drawn round the defect, mapping every vertex, and adding the signed areas of the image triangles. The total is 4π times the degree, and the integral column is that total divided by 4π before rounding. Each is read on three successively finer meshes and required to give the same integer on all three, because a mesh too coarse for its field does not produce a noisy answer — it produces a confident wrong one.

The point defect whose charge has no sign

A line defect is read on a loop; a point defect is read on a sphere, and the number that comes off the sphere is a degree. In a nematic that degree is an integer whose sign depends on a choice nobody can make — and the media where no such number exists at all are exactly the ones whose residual symmetry is a crystal class.

applied · Defects

Named alongside it

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

DefectLocal symmetryBurgers vectorClosureHomotopyOrder parameterConjugacy classCrystallographic restrictionDouble groupEnumerationThe Euler characteristicHolohedry

All concepts