Crystallography & Symmetry
patterns derived from their groups
Series

Composition — the series

6 essays on one idea, from the one that introduces it to the one that assumes the rest.
  1. Two half-turns make a translation. The half-turn about (0.25, 0.25) followed by the half-turn about (0.75, 0.5) is the translation by (1, 0.5) — twice the vector between the two centres, and not the vector itself. The open lens is a third centre, and it is not the midpoint of the two drawn: it is where the half-turn about the first lands when it is composed with one repeat vector of the lattice, which is half a repeat along. That is the step that puts two-fold centres on the half lattice and gives a p2 cell four inequivalent ones. Both the translation and the forced centre are computed from the operations and compared with the construction in exact rational arithmetic.

    Where the product is

    Composing two symmetries lands on a third — and the third one is somewhere. Two half-turns make a translation by twice the distance between their centres, and that single fact puts the lattice into a pattern before anybody chooses one.

    part 1 · operations
  2. glide: 3 mirrors. A glide of the plane, drawn together with the mirrors it is a product of. The first shape is the motif; the pale ones are what each mirror in turn produces; the last is the image the motion itself gives. There are 3 mirrors, which is the smallest number that can produce this kind of motion, and their product was formed and compared with the motion before the figure was drawn.

    Three reflections, and never four

    Every motion of the plane is a product of mirrors, and the number needed is never more than three. That count is not a curiosity about mirrors — it is the classification of the four motions written as an integer, with the parity of the number deciding handedness and the geometry of the last two mirrors deciding everything else.

    part 2 · operations
  3. Four of the seventeen have a centre, and they are the four with no rotation. For each plane group: the order of its point group, how many of its operations are rotations, the lattice vectors every operation of the point group fixes, and the centre those vectors make. A central element must commute with every translation, which forces its linear part to be the identity — so the centre is a group of translations, and a translation is central exactly when the point group leaves it alone. A rotation leaves nothing alone but zero.

    The four groups with a centre

    An element that commutes with everything has to commute with every translation, and that forces its linear part to be the identity. So the centre of a plane group is a group of translations — the ones its point group leaves alone — and a rotation leaves nothing alone but zero. Four of the seventeen have a centre and thirteen have nothing at all.

    part 3 · operations
  4. 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.

    part 4 · operations
  5. A screw out of two rotations that have none. Four pairs of located rotations of space, composed, with the result read back as a screw: its angle, and its pitch, which is the part of its translation lying along its own axis. Axes that meet give a rotation and no translation at all, because the point where they meet is fixed by both. Parallel half-turns give a translation. Skew axes give a screw — a motion with a translation in it, out of two motions with none — and the translation is twice the distance between the two axes. Nothing in either factor moves anything along the product's axis, and the product does.

    The axis a product lies on

    Two rotations of space about axes that do not meet compose to a screw — a motion with a translation in it, out of two that have none. The translation is twice the distance between the axes and the angle twice the angle between them, and the screw's own axis is not somewhere arbitrary: it lies on the two axes' common perpendicular, at a place the arithmetic gives.

    part 5 · operations
  6. 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.

    part 6 · operations

All series