Crystallography & Symmetry
patterns derived from their groups
Concept

p31m — where it appears

The plane group with three-fold centres lying off its mirror lines. Its abelianisation differs from p3m1's, which separates the pair by an invariant that never mentions the plane, where every picture can only illustrate the difference.

Named by 4 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The wallpaper group p3m1. A pattern with the symmetry of p3m1, generated by applying the group's 6 operations to an asymmetric motif and repeating across the lattice. The symmetries of the result were then found independently and match the group exactly.

p3m1 and p31m

Two groups with the same lattice, the same point group and the same number of operations, differing only in where the mirrors sit. The pair is the clearest evidence that position is as much a part of a symmetry as presence.

classification · Seventeen The crystal classes 3m, 3̅m, 6̅2m. 3m, 3̅m, 6̅2m: the orbit of a general direction under each group, giving 6, 12, 12 poles, with general positions and symmetry elements. Filled marks are poles above the plane of the page and open ones below it.

3m1 and 31m are one class

This site has an essay arguing that p3m1 and p31m are genuinely different groups. As point groups the same two objects are one class — and the two subgroups are each normal in the hexagonal holohedry, so nothing in the lattice relates them. What does is a rotation of thirty degrees.

point-groups · Crystal classes The friezes inside the seventeen. Every plane group contains frieze groups: keep only the operations that map one lattice row onto itself and what is left is a group on a strip, which must be one of the seven. Across all seventeen plane groups and their principal directions, all seven frieze groups appear. The commonest is p2, in 9 of the 32 rows examined.

The friezes inside the seventeen

Take one lattice row of a wallpaper pattern and keep only the symmetries that leave that row where it is. What survives is a frieze group — and which of the seven it turns out to be is a fact about the plane group that its symbol does not state.

classification · Friezes p3m1 and p31m, told apart without a picture. The two groups this site returns to most often: same point group, same lattice, same number of operations, and distinguished in every other essay here by where their mirrors sit relative to the lattice — which is a fact about the plane. Abelianised, they are ℤ2 and ℤ6, which are not isomorphic. That difference is a fact about the groups: no change of basis, no redrawing and no relabelling can carry one to the other, and the argument never mentions a mirror line.

What is left when the order is forgotten

Abelianising a group throws away the order of the letters in every word and leaves a small abelian group behind. It is computed by a Smith normal form, it never mentions the plane, and it separates p3m1 from p31m — which a picture can only illustrate.

operations · Presentations

Named alongside it

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

p3m1Point groupSubgroupAbelianisationClassificationCommutatorConjugacy classCoset enumerationCrystal classFrieze groupGroup extensionInvariant

All concepts