Basic Elements of Crystallography

This book is intended to be a complete and clear introduction to the field of crystallography. It includes an extensive discussion on the 14 Bravais lattices and the reciprocal to them, basic concepts of point- and space-group symmetry, the crystal structure of elements and binary compounds, and much more.

The purpose of this textbook is to illustrate rather than describe "using many words" the structure of materials. Even readers who are completely not familiar with the topic, but still want to learn how the atoms are arranged in crystal structures, will find this book useful. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises designed in such a way to encourage students to explore the different crystal structures they are learning about. The solutions to exercises are provided at the end of the textbook.

Nevill Gonzalez Szwacki is an assistant professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has a master’s degree in theoretical physics from the University of Warsaw and a PhD in computational physics from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 2004 he was a Robert A. Welch Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University, Texas Tech University, and Texas Southern University, USA. His research centers around computational modeling of novel magnetic and nonmagnetic materials with special emphasis on their size-dependent properties.

Teresa Szwacka is a professor of physics at the University of Los Andes (ULA), Venezuela, since 1969. She was one of the founders of the Department of Physics at ULA and was also for many years associated with the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw. She has a master’s degree in theoretical physics from the University of Warsaw and a PhD and habilitation in the field of condensed matter theory. Professor Szwacka has more than 40 years of experience in teaching physics courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her main research activity concerns the theoretical studies of the optical and transport properties in bulk and low-dimensional semiconductor systems.