Crystallography

Crystallography studies crystalline materials, their structures and properties, and methods for determining the atomic arrangements within them.

X-ray crystallography: A method that infers crystal structures from how crystals diffract X-rays. It is the best-known route from a crystal's diffraction pattern to its atomic structure.
Crystal structure: The ordered arrangement of atoms, ions, or molecules repeated through a crystalline solid. It is the structural object crystallographic methods describe and determine.
Protein crystallography: The determination of protein structures using diffraction from protein crystals. It adapts crystallographic structure determination to large biological molecules.
René Just Haüy: A French mineralogist whose work helped establish the idea that crystals have regular internal structure. His studies of cleavage and form helped frame crystals as internally ordered materials.
Small-angle X-ray scattering: A scattering technique that probes larger-scale structures through X-ray scattering at small angles. Unlike crystallography, it can characterize nanoscale organization without requiring long-range crystalline order.
Bragg's law: An equation relating X-ray wavelength, diffraction angle, and spacing between crystal planes. It links measured diffraction angles to distances between crystal planes.
Unit cell: The smallest repeating volume that generates a crystal lattice by translation. Its dimensions and contents provide a compact description of a crystal.
Electron crystallography: The use of electron diffraction or imaging to determine structures of crystalline materials. Electrons can reveal structures in crystals too small for conventional X-ray measurements.
William Henry Bragg: A British physicist who developed X-ray spectroscopy and pioneered X-ray analysis of crystals. His experimental work helped make crystal diffraction a practical structural method.
Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy: A spectroscopy method that uses nuclear magnetic behavior to probe molecular environments and structures. It can determine molecular structures in solution where crystals may be unavailable.

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