Crystallography & Symmetry
patterns derived from their groups
Concept

Semidirect product — where it appears

A group built from a normal subgroup and a quotient that splits, meaning the quotient is realised inside it rather than only above it. A symmorphic space group is such a product of its lattice and its point group, and a non-symmorphic one is not.

Named by 3 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Each arithmetic class holds exactly one symmorphic group. The arithmetic crystal classes this site enumerates in full, with the number of space groups each produces and the number of those that are symmorphic — that is, that have an origin at which every operation's translation part vanishes. The right-hand column is one in every row, over 25 groups in all, and the figure asserts it rather than reporting it. That is the bijection behind the number 73: there are seventy-three arithmetic crystal classes in three dimensions and seventy-three symmorphic space groups, and the correspondence is this one, class by class.

One symmorphic group per class

Every arithmetic crystal class holds exactly one space group in which some origin clears every translation part at once. That bijection is why there are seventy-three symmorphic space groups and seventy-three arithmetic classes, and it is checked here class by class rather than counted.

space-groups · Space groups p4g in 4 letters and 8 relations. The presentation of p4g, derived from the group's own operations. The two translations commute; each conjugation relation is read off a column of a matrix; and the point group's relations are corrected by the translation they actually come back as, which is what makes this group an extension rather than a semidirect product. Every relator is evaluated where the group lives and must be the identity, and coset enumeration on the letters alone returns 8, which is the order of the point group.

A group in four letters

Every other essay here describes a symmetry group by what it does to the plane. There is a second description — a handful of letters and the words in them that are required to equal nothing — and it can be counted with no plane anywhere in the computation.

operations · Presentations The ball of radius 5 in p6. Every element of p6 reachable in at most 5 multiplications by a generator or its inverse, plotted at its translation part — so each dot is a lattice position and its size says how few steps reach it. The picture is the word metric's unit ball scaled up, and its shape is what fixes the growth: a diamond where the group supplies two short translations, and a hexagon where it supplies three. Every dot here required the word problem to be solved, because the search has to know when two products are the same element.

Telling two words apart

There are finitely presented groups in which no algorithm can decide whether two products of the generators are the same element. The seventeen are not among them, and the procedure that settles it is short enough to state in a sentence — which then makes it possible to measure how fast each group grows.

operations · Presentations

Named alongside it

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

DecidabilityPresentationRelatorSymmorphicTodd coxeterAbelianisationArithmetic crystal classCayley graphCosetCoset enumerationExtensionGenerators

All concepts