Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-a-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2013/paper-2/section-a/4/solution

For conventional cubic cell side , the face-centered cubic lattice has corner and face-centre sites, giving four lattice points per cell; the body-centered cubic lattice has corners and a body centre, giving two. Their primitive unit cells each contain one lattice point. With reciprocal vectors written , face-centered cubic lattice allows all even or all odd, while body-centred cubic allows even. Hence
Here is the side of the reciprocal lattice's conventional cubic cell. The parity conditions describe the reciprocal point sets; reciprocal space contains wavevectors, not a second arrangement of physical atoms.

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