Subgroups — the series · Crystallography & Symmetry

The subgroups of p4m of index 2. p4m has 7 subgroup(s) of index 2 with cyclic quotient. 3 of them keep every translation and lose operations — the lattice is untouched and the pattern loses a symmetry at every point. 4 keep every operation and lose translations, and each is named beside the basis of the sublattice it keeps, written in the parent's own axes. Each subgroup is the kernel of a homomorphism onto a cyclic group, found by enumeration; each name is found by searching changes of basis and origin until the operation sets match exactly.

Two ways down from a group

A pattern can lose a symmetry by giving up an operation or by giving up a translation, and the two are different in kind. Sorting the seventy-four subgroups of index two among the seventeen splits them twenty-nine to forty-five — and a containment test that compares operations modulo one shared lattice can only see the twenty-nine.

part 1 · operations

The seventeen, arranged by what they can lose. Each group at the height of its own order, joined to every maximal subgroup that keeps all of its translations. Reading downwards is a crystal losing operations at a phase transition. The edges are the maximal ones only — every other containment is a path through these — and the whole graph is enumerated by closing every subset of each group's operations, so nothing is here because a table said so.

The descent with no shortcut

A subgroup can give up operations, or it can give up translations. Hermann's theorem says that a *maximal* subgroup does one or the other and never both at once — which is why a crystal losing symmetry can be followed one clean step at a time, and why every route from p6m down to p1 has exactly three steps.

part 2 · operations

Subgroups of index two, three and four. Every plane group with the number of subgroups it has at each small index, counted by enumerating the transitive actions on that many points. The zeros are the interesting entries: p3 has no subgroup of index two and the four-fold groups have none of index three, because a subgroup of index n gives an action on n points and the group has to have a quotient that can act. A rotation of order three has nowhere to go in a set of two, and one of order four has nowhere to go in a set of three that is not the identity — so the index is constrained by the point group before any geometry is done.

How many subgroups of index three

Taking operations away and closing what is left finds the maximal subgroups and stops there. Counting instead the ways a group can act on three points finds all of them — and finds that a four-fold group has none of index three at all.

part 3 · operations

Every subgroup of index two is normal; at index three most are not. For each of the seventeen plane groups, its abelianisation and the number of normal subgroups of each small index against the number of subgroups of that index. The index-two column is complete every time, because the left and right cosets of a subgroup of index two are the same pair of sets. At index three and four the two numbers part, and the gap is what normality costs: a subgroup that is carried to a different subgroup by some operation of the group it sits in.

The quotient each normal subgroup leaves

Two hundred and eighty-one subgroups of index four across the seventeen plane groups, and ninety-seven of them normal. Which ones, and what is left when they are divided out, needs no enumeration at all: below order six every group is abelian, so a normal subgroup of small index is a subgroup of the abelianisation and its quotient is decided by a product of greatest common divisors.

part 4 · operations

Free going down, two conditions going up. The edge between p2 and p4 in the diagram of maximal translationengleiche relations, read in both directions. Downwards it costs nothing: the quarter-turns are discarded and the lattice is exactly the lattice that was there, so every p4 pattern contains a p2 pattern. Upwards the added quarter-turns must carry the lattice onto itself, which forces the cell to have equal edges at a right angle — two conditions on a general oblique cell, which has only two parameters to give. So a p2 structure has a p4 supergroup exactly when its measured cell happens to be square, and the question is about the metric rather than about the group.

Going up costs the cell a parameter

The usual asymmetry — finitely many maximal subgroups below, infinitely many minimal supergroups above — is false in both halves for a plane group. Both directions are infinite and equinumerous index by index. The real asymmetry is that 17 of the 31 edges cost the lattice a parameter going up and nothing going down.

part 5 · operations

Three rules for 'square' are three shapes, and the cell falls between them. A measured cell placed by how far it is from each of the two conditions a square cell needs — equal edges across, a right angle up — each in its own standard uncertainties, so the square cells are the origin. Three rules for accepting the cell as square at the five per cent level are three regions. The two-condition χ² accepts inside the larger circle, of radius 2.45; testing each condition separately accepts inside the square of half-side 1.96; reading the distance as if it were one condition accepts inside the smaller circle, of radius 1.96. The measured cell, 2.22 and 0.75 from the two conditions, is inside the first region and outside the other two.

Two conditions are not one condition twice

Whether a plane structure has a higher-symmetry supergroup is decided by its measured cell, and the obvious measure — how many standard uncertainties the cell sits from a right angle, or from equal edges — cannot rank the candidates on its own. A square needs two conditions and a rectangle one, so a single distance means different things on each; counted properly, a square can score above the equal-edged lattices that contain it, and walking up the diagram one condition at a time is the reading that keeps the ranking coherent, at a price that has to be paid in its error rate.

part 6 · operations

Every stratum a primitive cubic cell lies on, and the steps between them. The ten lattice strata a primitive cubic cell lies on, from triclinic, with no condition, to cubic, with five, each with the number of linear conditions it imposes on the cell's six parameters, joined wherever one adds conditions to the other with nothing between. There are 14 steps and 10 paths from the bottom to the top: nine of four steps, through a monoclinic, the orthorhombic and a tetragonal stratum, and one of two, through the rhombohedral.

A cubic cell has fourteen chances to fail

In the plane, deciding whether a measured cell is square meant two steps up a short diagram, and dividing the error rate between them fixed the test. In space, a primitive cubic cell sits on ten strata joined by fourteen steps on ten different paths, and a walk that tests every step at five per cent calls more than a quarter of true cubic cells something less. Dividing the level by the steps of one path is not enough and dividing it by all fourteen is too much. Measured directly, the right level is two-thirds of a per cent a step, and calibrated that way the walk notices a tetragonal distortion more often than the single test it replaces.

part 7 · operations